Retirement Home Melee at Salad Bar

They say it began with an elderly man
foraging through the icebergs and romaines.

They say another who prefers his salad
without a stranger's fingerprints

and Stop. From there, they say, curses
hissed through dentures. From there, fists.

They say it was a fracas, knocked bifocals
and clattering canes, the wooden screech

of chair legs, some to break up the scuffle
and some to shuffle off on a bad knee,

or pinned hip, or pace-makered heart.
One is bitten, they say. Another wears

a cut across his forehead, blood flowing
down the canals of his wrinkles.

Next day's the same old same old,
as they say. Back to the quiet swing

of living without velocity or fire.
Shuffleboard and Pinochle, the dull

click of knitting needles, their final
gray years going limp. Or so they say.

 

David Hernandez, Hoodwinked (Sarabande Books, 2011) 

Waging Peace

How beautiful on the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who
announces peace. Isaiah 52: 7

 

Not something separate. Not
a convenient screen, a wall hastily fabricated
to keep a conflict's blaze contained.
Or the self safe.

Nor something hammered out at tables.
And never sentimental, say a moonlit evening,
an incandescent sky. The Pacific Ocean
on a breathless day. You might as well

wage peace as war. You'd have to stand
exposed at the crossroads of unguarded anger,
a presence, not an absence,
not gritting your teeth. Forcing your clenched hands

open. Your heart's hard core
and everything the stubborn mind conceals
revealed. Disarmed
you may become disarming,

the terror in your unmasked face
radiant, your unshod, wounded feet beautiful
beyond words.

 

Sarah Klassan, Imagine a World: Poetry for Peacemakers (Pax Christi, 2005)

Some Days

Some days you have to turn off the news
and listen to the bird or truck
or the neighbor screaming out her life.
You have to close all the books and open
all the windows so that whatever swirls
inside can leave and whatever flutters
against the glass can enter. Some days
you have to unplug the phone and step
out to the porch and rock all afternoon
and allow the sun to tell you what to do.
The whole day has to lie ahead of you
like railroad tracks that drift off into gravel.
Some days you have to walk down the wooden
staircase through the evening fog to the river,
where the peach roses are closing,
sit on the grassy bank and wait for the two geese.

 

Philip Terman, Our Portion (Autumn House Press, 2015)

Child's Play

I play the World Series with marbles
on our vine-laced Persian carpet:
its palaces are bases,
its bowers become dugouts
where my heroes' cards wait
for their manager's hand.
I play both sides, home and away,
hitter and fielder—as always
no one on my team but me.

Adult shapes, fat and crooked,
bald and creased or worn thin,
edge around me,
pass through the house smiling
down as if to say dear child
you know nothing outside
your magic carpet, which
one day you'll find is only a rug
that will take you no place at all.

But I have just jumped
an impossible height, caught
Roger Maris' hot line drive to right
and brought it back over the fence.
The roar of the crowd
puts any doubt to rest: in that moment I am blessed
and that moment is all there is.

 

Dan Diberthson, The Pitch Is On the Way: Poems about Baseball and Life, published by author, 2008

Just One God

And so many of us.
How can we expect Him
to keep track of which voice
goes with what request.
Words work their way skyward.
Oh Lord, followed by petition —
for a cure, the safe landing.
For what is lost, missing —
a spouse, a job, the final game.
Complaint cloaked as need —
the faster car, porcelain teeth.
That so many entreaties
go unanswered
may say less about our lamentable
inability to be heard
than our inherent flawed condition.

Why else, at birth, the first sound
we make, that full-throttled cry?
Of want, want, want.
Of never enough. Desire
as embedded in us as the ancestral tug
in my unconscienced dog who takes
to the woods, nose to the ground, pulled far
from domesticated hearth, bowl of kibble.
Left behind, I go about my superior business,
my daily ritual I could call prayer.

But look, this morning, in my kitchen,
I’m not asking for more of anything.
My husband slices bread,
hums a tune from our past.
Eggs spatter in a skillet.
Wands of lilac I stuck in a glass
by the open window wobble
in a radiant and — dare I say it?—
merciful light.

 

Deborah Cummings, Counting the Waves (Word Technological Communication, 2006)

Design

I pour a coating of salt on the table
and make a circle in it with my finger.
This is the cycle of life
I say to no one.
This is the wheel of fortune,
the Arctic Circle.
This is the ring of Kerry
and the white rose of Tralee
I say to the ghosts of my family,
the dead fathers,
the aunt who drowned,
my unborn brothers and sisters,
my unborn children.
This is the sun with its glittering spokes
and the bitter moon.
This is the absolute circle of geometry
I say to the crack in the wall,
to the birds who cross the window.
This is the wheel I just invented
to roll through the rest of my life
I say
touching my finger to my tongue.

 

Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House, 2001)

The Radiation Waiting Room

They bring us to this pastel room,
          point to the lockers,
          point to the dressing rooms.
It could almost be a gym,
          only there’s a wheelchair, there’s Health News,
          there’s a complicated flower jigsaw puzzle,
          there are romance novels to borrow
          in case you will be returning often.
We change into gowns that tie in the back;
          some of us get to keep on our shirts,
          some our pants;
          we all wear shoes.
Those of us who have come so often
          wait comfortably,
          take care of the new ones,
          offer answers, directions, suggestions.
Only we are careful not to say
          how long we’ve been coming
          or what we have or
          what they’ve done
          or are about to do.

 

Susan Herron Sibbet, Great Blue (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2006)