Tag Archives: poetry

Poetry Season

There are poems hiding
in the mountains of the soul.
I glimpse pieces of them
furtively, as if I’m speeding by
through a forest of trees.
I’m often too focused on my destination
to make out their finer features,
jotting down snippets and impressions
before moving on,
but I’d like to stop and pull out a sketchbook,
and set up a camera
or trap
and capture an entire poem at once.
I’m tempted to turn on my hazards,
and pull off onto the shoulder,
but it’s hard to go poem-hunting
with passers by constantly
going out of their way to ask you about it.
They see you staring intently at nothing
and loudly ask if you’re alright.
They startle it,
and if you can’t hush them,
the poem bounds away before
you’ve even snapped a blurry picture of it.
You’re better off on the scenic byways,
crawling over dirt roads,
or ditching the roads all together
to meander the overgrown paths of life,
stopping to listen as poems crash
and tumble through the underbrush,
anticipating where they’ll feed out or bed down,
hoping to spot one from a distance
to be weighed, considered,
stalked up on with bare feet, quietly
until you can breathe it in,
until you can almost reach out and touch it
before it disappears.

On Bringing My Daughter to College

This part of my life has always been separate.
Everyday I leave our house behind;
I drive these roads
and walk these paths
alone,
and my two worlds
have never intersected.
Until today.

My time on campus 
has always been about learning
and living dreams,
so it’s funny that it took you 
coming to school with me to teach me
how much of my dreams are already here
in you.

Nature

The boys found a field mouse family’s
burrow beneath one of their tents.
The mother ran under a bush to watch
as the scouts inspected the shallow trench.
In the earth she’d made a careful nest,
laid with cotton fluff and fine, dry grass
for the naked body of a birth-blind pup,
which chirped as it searched for her in the dirt.
I covered the place with a piece of bark,
and whispered to boys to step away and watch
the mother come back from where she’d fled.
They crushed her pup with a rock instead.

Something in Writing

There is something in writing

                greater than the simple groups of letters

                            through which we meet our restless thoughts,

                            which breathes a vibrant life into the words,

                that transcends sentences of meaning,

that recreates something in reading.

Last Jew in Vinnitsa

An officer shoves me to the edge of the pit.
“Kneel!” he screams.
My knee sinks into the mud at the brink,
and I look in and see death,
twisted and tangled in bare heaps of limbs,
contorted unnaturally on the faces of children,
their eyes as wide and scared and lifeless
as those of the bigger bodies around them.
They were shot in lines that moved forward as one,
sometimes holding hands as the soldiers
took aim and fired.
There is no line for me because
there is no one left to shoot.
Entire families gone.
Entire swaths of the city erased,
the ghettos as empty as their vacant eyes.
And I am the last one.
The last Jew in Vinnitsa.
I lock eyes with a face below me.
We have much in common:
both brown-haired, both Jews, both dead.
I feel a barrel press against my skull.
“Wait, you dummkopf, you’ll get his filthy brains
all over you if you shoot him like that.
Step back, and wait for the picture:
this is the last one, after all.”
“Look up!”
I stare at the blurring face while
the photographer makes a few adjustments.
“Eins…”
A breeze plays gently with my hair.
“Look up, Schwein!”
I wonder who will see this picture.
“Zwei…”
I inhale deeply and raise my eyes.
“Drei!”
A flash of light—

JWNODY Before Exit

A woman with short hair and a red sweater
smiles into the camera as she explains
that she’s been very busy lately,
and her mind is a little jumbled.
She’s been preparing to meet Ti
and the other level-above-humans
in a ship behind the Hale-Bopp comet,
which is passing by Earth a few days prior
to the planet’s recycling.
She talks about business and
casually recounts a few anecdotes.
With a coquettish grin she tells the group’s clients:
“you might need to get someone else
to finish up your website right now.”
There is chuckling behind the camera.
“And one last thing we’d like to say is”
here she taps the space above her left breast,
Star Trek style,
“Thirty-nine to beam up.”
More laughter this time.
Someone claps as the clip fades.
On the surface it’s just a funny way to end a vlog,
only she isn’t joking.
They really were all taken away—
in body bags after they killed themselves.