Obama Drama

Inexplicably I have lived into middle age without having written a clerihew. My life is now complete; this changes everything. If this is not my Everest, it is my answer to one of my son's favorite questions: "What is the smallest mountain in the world?" (The ant hill in the front yard--how should I know?).

Barack Obama our President
Has learned from precedent:
Nothing worse than being defeatist
Unless it's being labeled elitist.

Orion Rising

Like needles infinitely thin
And infinitely cold,
Relentless stars resist the dawn
And pierce the restive mind.

Too beautiful for us, those suns
Recede. Before they fade
They cast the Hunter's lying form:
I cannot not see Him.

But could we travel there, his limbs,
His helm, his mighty sword
Would shiver mockingly apart
As Betelgeuse conspired.

In all the universe Orion exists
Just here, beholden to blinding human need.

Two More

I've never been much of a poetry writer, and until recently I hadn't set my hand to one in some fifteen years. I'm not sure why I've felt inclined lately (although I can guess).

I've also never been a big fan of formal rhyme, which in unskilled hands can lapse into the sing-songy, stilted, and sentimental. Thus this attempt in sonnet form:

Daughter's Day

Girl rides her horse with childlike gravity;
Defiance thereof, perhaps, makes her rejoice
To cross this paradise of grass and trees
In summer's silence but for the crickets' noise.

It never will be simple like this again:
The girl and animal, a space to share.
She brushes Princess Star and looks within
The foreign eyes, interpreting their stare.

The horse's muteness sobers and puzzles her;
She seeks to draw her into consciousness.
About the lives of others we can infer,
Propose, conjecture, extrapolate at best.

She parses difference, intuits "same,"
Explores, enlarges, and learns the limits of "tame."


And this one indulges my weakness for the subjective sublime, and for a very conventional pun:

Carolina Beach

Boy hurls himself against the surf, as sun
And sea contend on the ribboned anvil of rock,
Or tiny rocks, the sand, the earth ground down
Into flowing stone. The boy is one
Of mine, a drop of sea-stuff bound in bone
And sinew, fired by solar elements,
Warmed to the point of restless self-regard.
We came from there, I think, correct myself--
Not we, but bits of matter did congregate
In acts of whimsy, once, until the game
Developed needs, demands, to be gratified
Or denied. The water waits with awful patience,
Inscrutably, for what I do not know.
The sea is self-estranged; its progeny
See its depths as alien, visceral.
The ocean swallows the sun, in dreams at least.
But I think otherwise: the sea will boil
Five billion years from now, when all are gone.
But now I watch my son, scorched by our star,
But cooled by salty spray from the abyss,
Stand before a towering wave, which swats
Him flat onto the river of scraping stone.
He rises, laughing: son is victor, now.

A Playground, Once

This is mine:

They climb the ropes with small, determined fists,
Delighting in the planetary pull.
Unknown children play in parallel;
The lives of others mean everything and nothing.

The sun, benignant, violates the dark,
Burning color into bewildered sight.
A train's whistle sounds, its anchored tracks
Forlornly straight, its body massively wrought
As it pushes past our gratuitous idyll.

The beasts are absent, but for a wheeling bird
Or vigilant squirrel; the animals are gone.
We have made this land our own, have scoured
It clean but for this empty green expanse;
Kids play in the vacuum of myriad other springs.
The creekside walnuts bear witness, their boughs aloft.

Recall it just like this, no matter what
Happens, this is the way it was this day.
They grow now in the harsh glare of change,
But storied shadows, specters of memory,
Sit silently far off, and watch and wait.