GROCERY LIST

All the world for poetry is grist,
but the machinery can go awry.
A villanelle becomes a grocery list.

Sunspots, they tell us, seem to be the gist.
Mexican rains drown monarch butterflies.
All the world for poetry is grist.

Below the ozone hole, penguin chicks
cannot find krill enough to survive.
A villanelle becomes a grocery list.

False spring confuses. Timing missed,
eggs will not hatch. No fledglings fly.
All the world for poetry is grist.

In troposphere where trade winds tryst,
ice crystals melt. Grain fields go dry,
A villanelle becomes a grocery list.

Not our concern, our leader insists.
Free enterprise will cleanse the dirt in sky.
All the world for poetry is grist,
A villanelle becomes a grocery list.



MAY DAY

The country is at war.
She can't clean or cook or think.
Squirrels chase each other down a holly tree,
winding like silver ribbons through the green.

At an outdoor cafe,
she lunches with May, a former pupil
now fresh from the hospital
where her roommate hanged herself.

May hadn't liked the hospital.
She's seen Satan in the bathroom.
Telling this, her eyes glow red.
But--good news--she's been saved!

Pulling from her bag a Bible
bristling with bookmarks,
May reads aloud to her old teacher
and confides,

"You are my best friend."
Flowering cherries sway
like prom dresses.
Violets bend in the breeze.

Her daughter had been May's age
and suffered the same disease.
She wants to spit on a handkerchief
as her own mother used to, wipe

the milk from the corners of May's
mouth and send her demons chattering
off to the squirrels overhead.
But she's no savior.

She hugs May, waves goodbye,
goes home exhausted. TV reports
the bombing of a school bus full
of young girls wearing scarves.

She decides on a nap and dreams
of luncheon at the White House,
and attends, dressed
as a beautiful white horse.






Deer Brooke Run

An illegal deal set rows
of million dollar houses–French
chateaux of Tyvek and pressed wood–
on quarter-acre lots.

They squat upon the leaching pan,
suck up the aquifer,
encroach on the meadows
of the town's last farm.

Our children in this enclave
learn to succeed.
Some will stay, come to power,
give the orders, cut the deals.

By then, we parents will have moved
to Florida for golf.
As the water grows more poisonous;
new houses fill the fields.




CONVERSATION STOPPERS FOR THE FAR TOO POLITE

Money
What about those mutual funds?
What about non-mutual funds?
What about funds that beat each other up?
What about those funds that ruined my life?
Do you know your brother was my broker?
Just when is he going to prison?
How much money do you have anyway?
Can you loan me some?

Religion
What can we know, what can we hope for,
how are we to live? Such good questions–
do you walk on coals or play with snakes?
Are you the sort with grape juice,
or the really bad wine?
What about those people who kneel
and can't get up again?
Do you have a special prayer
or do you use a forklift?
And the crazies in your congregation,.
Do you put them in a pew in the back?
Or do you do as we do, wait for them to die?

Race
Well, our people come from Coney Island.
We are white because we ate so much popcorn.
The Y Chromosomes can be traced from my father
to his father and his great grandfather
400,000 years back to a chicken
who actually was a penguin
before the Ice Age melted.
Now tell me about your people.





Freedom

This poem has no zippers,
no metal buttons on its jeans,
no metal shanks in its shoes,
no metal in its hip.

It wears no suspenders,
no belt buckle,
no under wired bra,
no false gold in its ears.

Dressed in gauzy cargo pants,
silk top and flip flops,
it raises no suspicions, wafts through security,
the gate, the tunnel to the plane.

It takes off into the stratosphere
where the air is not owned
and laughter cannot be bought.
Speaking softly on the intercom,

it fires up the neurons
of passengers and crew.
to a lightening of ideas
that seeds the needed rain.





Jane Addams: Founder of Hull-House, President, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
b. Sept. 6,1860, d. May 21,1935

Unspoken - May 21, 1935

I think Louise is sitting in the chair at the foot of the bed.
She shouldn't look so solemn A doctor told me once
an old woman is the hardest thing to kill. .
Tuberculosis , typhoid, cancer -they've lost each round till now -
Jamie and Hooker are in the corridor for a breath of air.
They know to bury me in Cedarville, not make a fuss,
and know me well enough that I'd rather like a fuss…

And here you are my dear Mary, standing
right by my pillow, three feet off the floor.

The doctor just gave me the morphine.
I'd object if he asked, he didn't ask.
How lucky I am it has brought you now.

You always knew what I was going to say
before I said it- the only discovery I haven't written down
acted upon, spoken about, published, funded
help transform into the law.

The less I said, the more people listened,
the more I listened the more I knew their hearts
as you knew mine. You gave me the privacy
of being known, the strength to continue
in public life, past praise
past repudiation, past all our hopes that humans
could begin to break the habit of murder.

"First Social Settlement in Chicago" sounds like
Indians at a tea party- a free art gallery
in the 19th Ward - – How the papers hooted
but visitors poured in – hunger of the mind
sharp as the belly's – we could feed one
when still ignorant of the other. So our neighbors
joined our lives and let us into theirs. No matter how strange
another life is, enter that life, you'll find connection.

The young man climbing in the upstairs window
at Hull-House-hoping to rob us, weather so bad,
he was desperate, he could have walked
in the front door, never locked, but he was a man
of a conventional disposition, shocked when suggested
we talk, go down to the kitchen for some bread and tea.
He came back the next day and we found him a job.

Riding the garbage truck
when two feet of garbage was scraped away,
there was the source of the tainted water
and we could stop the typhoid. That same day
W.E. DuBois came to speak, we delivered Molly Riley's baby
Emily Eames gave a benefit musicale:
we wore white gloves.

So much money Emily gave to Hull-House
to learn of midwifery, cocaine, truancy,
socialism, communism, anarchism,
and "the social value of the saloon."

Oh, Molly buried in Potter's Field, tiny Goosie,
blown off the roof when he was helping his mother
hang the laundry. That unemployed clerk I insisted
take that construction job dead of pneumonia in a week.

Mary, that dream again the same when I was six.
Alone –Everyone else in Cedarville at the cemetery.
Up to me to make a wagon wheel if the world
would ever move again. Why I hung about the door
of the blacksmith's shop and he'd explain
just how the sizzle of cold water
hardena red hot iron into steel.

If I hadn't been so frail I frightened Father
just after the new baby died, then Mother,
he wouldn't have paid me such attention.
explained his businesses, talked to me of books-
nor would I have read his entire library by the age of 12. -
He paid me fifty cents for each one of Plutarch's Lives,

I would have had to learn to cook and quilt and sew
play the piano, not run through the woods
with my stepbrother George killing snakes and stuffing them,
talking with that old couple who had lost five sons in the War.

My father and his fellow abolitionists
in Ripon, Wisconsin, were not thinking of that couple
or their sons when they nominated Lincoln,
"Dear, double "D" Addams, I am counting on you,"
Lincoln's letters to my father would begin.

"Better to light a candle. ". My back, "too twisted for marriage,"
the doctor told me, "You have a farm, you live
off the peasants, the fat of the land, " Tolstoy complained.
The twist and the fat – some of us are elected to be the wick
and the tallow. Well, we burned as brightly as we could
showing what others did not wish to know.

Before each bayonet charge,
special rations of spirits issued to the men
How else were they to disembowel another human being?
They had not been brought up for that.
Was I to say war is a noble venture?
After what we had seen? You and I in those hospitals?
Twenty thousand men dead one day at the Somme.
Six hundred children in one small French village sticks and eyes,
starvation used by our country as a weapon.

Saber rattler Teddy Roosevelt made us hated
where once we had been loved. Wilson
adopted our ideas for peace, in deed denied them,
breeding tyrants in a vengeful peace. But they are gone.
Eleanor is not. What a send off she gave me! Arranging
for me to speak once more of peace. The message on the radio
went round the world. But of course you know. Invisible,
you are always with me. So dear Light,

how can I be afraid of the dark?
That's when things begin to be interesting...
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