Half a Heritage

And then there’s Dad, sent off  
at twelve to boarding school  
where he learned the rudiments 
of Lutheran theology and how

to do his own laundry and how  
to smoke a pack a day, a thing  
so well learned that it became  
a 57 year old habit. Do the math

and you’ll know how short he  
lived, how long he blew smoke  
rings for me and my siblings  
as he wrote his sermons, graded

papers, sipped a martini, watched  
Gunsmoke and my brother’s baseball  
games and my mother as she lifted  
loaves from the oven, all with

the pleasure of a twelve-year-old,  
the devotion of a monk whose  
charge it is to focus on the cup,  
the host, open mouths all around.

 

Mary M. Brown, The Christian Century October 23, 2023

"To Be of Use"

 

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

 

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

 

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

 

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

Margie Piercy, Circles on the Water (Alfred A. Knopf, 1973)

Mend

My Mama had the gift of hand sewing—one perfect stitch
after another perfect stitch, eyeballing the precise length 

of thread needed to repair what had ripped a gaping 
hole, unmaking the whole swath of cotton-polyester fabric

she draped across her delicate boney shoulders before 
a night out with my father—painting the town red 

she said of those early dates when he handed her his fat 
quarters hoping they would be enough to make something 

beautiful like the outfits she sewed: plaid culottes with matching 
vests, paisley dresses, fringed halters—she tells me this while 

I watch the needle bully a ruby rivulet from her thumb, sullying 
the myth of cotton without the blood, when she tries to mend 

my middle-school uniform skirt, a navy pleat I never noticed 
had been stretched into splitting—

 

L. Renee, poetrynw.org June 11, 2022

The Next Generation of Mourning

 

I have begun, like my mother before me,
to cross out names. She lived to read the obituaries
of all her friends. In my generation, the first girl
I ever kissed is dead, complications of pneumonia.

I saw the email on the way from something
important to something suddenly not, and felt
nothing, as if a high-powered bullet had passed
through me without hitting heart or head or bone.

Later: the ache as I remembered
when we were 16, in a state
of mutual crush, and rode to the lake—
that parent-approved, church-sponsored
alternative to a real beach trip,
and made out in the back seat of a red ’64
Chevy Impala with Ray driving and Mable
looking back now and then to wink and grin.

Soon the romance was over and we moved on,
but never forgot that date, and when
I saw her forty years later we still joked
and smiled about that ride and wondered
whatever happened to Ray and Mable.

 

Richard Allen Taylor, Armed and Luminous (Main Street Publishing Company, 2016)

Adage

 

When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

Billy Collins, Aimless Love (Random House, 2013)

Cathedrals

 We went out early

to water our tomato tree,

a ripening Park’s Whopper

potted beside the yellow onions.

 

From the stalk to the ledge

there was something

birthed overnight:

all air shine,

fine-threaded and intricate

it stretched,

holding court

with drops of dew,

gleaming in the light.

 

Oh! I gasped,

as I marveled

at the spider’s web.

How she must have

toiled in the dead

of night to produce

this holy silk:

so delicate, too,

and yet so indestructible.

Those tiny spires

and vaulted ceilings

patterned with her chisel,

all held tight at the center

and spun out hexagonal.

 

At once, I was gazing

at the Gothic turrets

of Notre Dame

before the fires

marred her.

At once, the flowers

in the foreground

became the spider’s

stained-glass windows,

and I felt the urge to kneel

and kiss the ground

in prayer.

 

And I heard:

Who needs the trappings

of four walls

or to travel to the city,

when everywhere

in nature

there are cathedrals?

 

Kimberly Phinney, radixmagazine.com April 12, 2023

At the Children's Violin Concert

          Firmly bowed
strands of horse hair
          tightened or
gathered up by
          a small hand to play
          a piece by J. S. Bach
who drank 36 cups of coffee every day.

I like him because he was
inspired by his belief in God
& he played an organ in a church
in Leipzig & he walked on
cobblestone streets to his home
every evening where he fathered
many children & wrote music
for his wife to clean house by.
He worked hard all his life
& when he died, he left us
all the little notes he made
for himself while he was alone.

Susan Cataldo, Drenched: Selected Poems of Susan Cataldo (Telephone Books, 2003)