Categories
2020 American Place Poems

At your service

What does it mean to serve?
To be in the service of another
To wash the feet and tender oil
To sit with the weak as they pass
To lend shoulder to grief while it lasts

Or do you help my day?
To be there when the toilet’s clogged again
To put my squeaky car back on the road
To come to my rescue in my grave hour
To bless my wedding or baptize my child

Or perhaps action’s calling?
To serve when duty beckons you to arms
To shield your brother’s harm from far away
To protect the unknown with your own life
To put back the pieces when peace finally comes

Or to relieve the woes of folks?
To social workers holding back the brink
To the nurse whose hour saves a child’s life
To the lottery winners who tip a grand
To those who help others with nothing asked
‘Cept
“How can I help you?”

Categories
2020 American Place Poems

What do we make of it?

I do not break,
‘Cept for the line,
The cobble stones
Removed by time

I do not build,
‘Cept on the theme,
A lasting home
For my family

What do we make?
With this poetry
Not castle nor treasure
Just memories

Just minuscule
Glimpses
Into the moment
Of the mind’s
Poetic
I

Categories
2020 American Place Ars Poetica Poems

WCW (Metercratic Oath)

Got it right, got it right
Doctor Williams
Got it right

The trick is in the meter
solid rhythm, perfect beat
Well balanced measure
Pluck the string elegan’ly

Don’t forget the tercet
A quatrain will suffice

Just keep it in just meter
Or the critics will complain
That you have made no mastery
Of that which Williams claimed

Yet me I like my brevity
And dabble in vain rhymes
But The meter,
O the meter
I will take
and
do no harm.

Categories
2020 Albuquerque American Place Poems

Sitting Waiting

Sitting in a skateshop
Boy’s buyin’ a board
Old man sitting
Under origami
Birds Flying
up the glass
Walls
As he looks
For a home
For the night.

City living
Breathing life;
Sounds of
Cycles, cars
A fight,
the honks
And groans
Of an otherwise
Still afternoon.

Categories
2020 American Place Poems

1/1/2020

Been lost in books
This new found day
Drowning in their words
Find time by what they say

The Great American Dead!*

Their voices stifled
By dust, in bookcases
Their pages rifled
By Pilgrims seeking places

To give glory
To the Great
American
Story.

Often they’ve looked in
On the old, cold dark walls and halls of Europeans
But that boat has sailed
With the Revolution

And Moderns;
We seek
Curt details.

*Dickinson, Longfellow, Whitman, Frost, Williams