GRAVEYARDS

Arlington is no longer.
Its perfect rows of whitewashed markers
blown a thousand miles away,
all plowed up in furrowed ground,
an awesome, massive rending.
Fertile ragged soil,
unkempt and wild,
lies in heaped haphazard piles.
Gettysburg is the same,
the ancient battlefield
newly scarred and ripped,
torn and twisted,
as if a thousand cannon balls
had lashed the earth again.
In Orleans town
ancient sacred mausoleums
crack and crumble,
lie crushed in awful ruin
as in Katrina's days.
In Tombstone's sunlit desert
Boot Hill is blown apart.
Cowboys laid there,
boots turned up,
their epitaphs now gone,
forgotten words found tangled
in ravaged thorny weeds.
Across the roiling seas,
the greens of Normandy
feel once again the gash of war,
rocks and boulders tossed about,
flowered fields quick overturned.
All has gone amuck.
In lands beyond the sun,
Khmer's killing fields
are carved asunder
and further still
Rwandan ditches
open wide to brighting sun.
Green Acres no longer green!
My father's grave open wide!
On that great day we all will know:
it's not just One
who rises up!

Fire of Stars

It is well before the dawn and the moon,
long ago, slip slid quietly away,
leaving glowering stars barely winkling
behind the black rage of thunder head clouds.
In the great beyond these stars, fuming fuel,
burn brilliant, lighting up their galaxies,
but here, among these planets we call home,
they seem benign, harmless, and far away.
Light years of distance separate us all,
so we do not feel their awful burning,
nor their bright day warmth. Not good or evil,
they are small white blinks in a midnight sky.
Here beneath, we wrestle with ramping clouds,
though rainbows promise there will be no flood,
no catastrophic downpour cascading
over all we know. No endless floating
on wooden rafts till all is drowned and dead.
Still, we only see this closer danger.
We study clouds, ignore the falling stars
Cataclysmic infernos surely come.
All will burn to nothing in white hot flame.
On that great day, only what lasts remains.
So why do we fear the dark’ning storm clouds,
when it is collapsing stars that kill us?

Bug Hunting

Grandma took the boys bug hunting,
turned over leaves, stems, twigs,
watched bugs scurry from their places,
searched for little bug houses in the grass,
created imaginary bug families,
wistful worlds of spiders, beetles, worms.

Smiling, bowed on hands and knees,
before wide-eyed, brown-skinned boys,
Grandma wove fabulous chronicles
of the lives and times of tiny arthropods,
little creatures most of us have never noticed,
unless we’re small enough to bend our knees.

Eventually the boys learned of the dispute
between myth and fact, story and data,
but it was a dark, dreadful day,
a clouded, foul, wretched day,
when the bugs’ world disappeared,
like a monsoon rain down an empty ditch.

Scientific skepticism soon replaced
awe and wonder in their eyes
as they’d recount their Grandma’s lovely lies.
Frowning brows and confused concern
finally took the place of giggled stories
about the secret, scary lives of bugs.

They speak of bug hunting now
as something that they used to do,
a silly little childish game
that wiled away the hours of the day,
but I still remember the pure enchantment,
the guileless gawking reverie of little boys.

Today I bend on aging knees,
to contemplate creepy crawlers
scuttling their way across the earth.
I imagined them heading home to families,
after a hard day grinding leaves
and disappear into the mystery.

For Kathy

A sonnet for my love

In those moments, when your sweet eyes light up,
when laughter bubbles deep inside your throat,
your smile lies warm, like tea inside a cup.
You are ocean where I would drift and float.
If I begin to drown and flail about,
should ancient fears quick grab and hold my heart,
if I sink slow, my mind a sea of doubt,
then you’d be sail, my compass and my chart,
for I see starlight twinkling in your eyes,
a luminescent moon upon your lips,
I find my surface just above the lies,
your breath of love that time cannot eclipse.
Then still, should all the swirling currents shift,
deep in your love, I find God’s gracious gift.

Grandma Hugen

I see her face, ancient, lined, severe.
Dark eyes, intense, staring
behind old rimmed glasses
that I remember from long before
we carried her box
to the grassy Iowa fields.
Old eyes that saw her husband to his grave
- and much earlier - her eldest son,
a war hero, who drove back
into an ammo dump holocaust
to save his dying friends.
Pieces of his Coast Guard jeep
were scattered all over rich Nebraska farms.
For a while, then, it seemed
she resigned her way
to the insanity of death and pain,
chasing ghosts and grandpa
with hate filled eyes, raging anger.
Or so I’m told,
but she must have rallied,
when I knew her as a kid,
because I don’t remember her as mean.
In later years her baby boy died,
gasping his life away
from a conspiracy of choices,
weather, dust, and Camel cigarettes.
He tore both our hearts in two.
We were miles away from each other,
and could not share the bleeding.

I wandered alone
through brilliant tulip gardens
to find her wood floored room
lost in the Old People’s Home,
which is what they called it
before it became pejorative and impolite.
It was late morning,
the sun lambent through frame windows,
It shone softly on the gently scalloped words
of an ancient Bible held in gnarled hands
inches from her nose.
She looked up when I knocked
on the half open door,
she was sitting beautifully framed
in the dusty grace of light streams
slipping soft through cobwebbed windows.
I will always remember her
caught in that moment.
“It’s me, Grandma,” I said.
She greeted me by my given name,
not the name by which I’m known,
I was suddenly a kid again,
sneaking pink peppermints,
and elephant peanuts from the cabinet
by the ancient Fridgedaire.
Naughty and loved,
like I always feel now,
and felt around her then.

We talked for a while, of Dad and life,
the things that might have been.
She asked me if I'd read the Psalms for her.
I took her Bible in my hands,
she bent her tear stained face
toward the Giver of the light.
She knew the words before I said them,
mouthed them silently to another world.
A world I could not see, but knew was close.
Before I left, I knelt
beside her brown stockinged feet,
pillowed on the age-old hassock.
I prayed an inside prayer.
Silent. Alone. Together.
We both knew it would be
the last time we would speak,
we murmured soft goodbyes,
I checked my watch
to see if I would make the sixty miles
to Des Moines in time to catch a plane.
When I looked back she was smiling
holding her Bible near her nose.
Her eyes were somewhere else.

Elegy Of Lemon Trees When Winter Ends

The pale white lemon blossoms jerk to life,
fooled by false promises of early spring,
all bright and brilliant, shimmering in white,
they spew lovely fragrance to dancing breeze.
Visions of sweet nectared fruit course their veins;
limbs, boughs, and twigs rush life giving juices,
fill cracks and crevices with faith filled hope,
the kind that does not think of tomorrow.

It is the next day when dull clouds roll in,
foreboding blanketers of dying sun,
stifling monsters exhaling frigid air.
Winter returns with all its latent lies.
Too late the blossoms understand their fate.
Too late they fight to save themselves the pain.
Too late they lose their helpless grasp of life.
One by one they drift dying to the ground.

The earth is covered with a sea of white,
a field of crosses on a thousand graves.
Like massive shrouds they whitewash barren roots,
a million dead with others yet to fall.
Resurrection seems little more than myth.
The whistling winter winds shout out the lie,
the vicious lie that this is all there is.
Behold those silly fools who disbelieve.

Such are the ways of resurrection days,
appearing after winter strikes its blow,
that final shock that ends all hope of life.
“How can it come again?” the scoffers ask,
“See, there is no fruit upon the branches.”
And, truth be told, we can’t imagine it,
for we know where all the flowers have gone,
decaying, decomposing in the muck.

A day goes by, then maybe two or three,
when hope becomes a fading memory,
a story’s end, where all just fades to black.
Then blasting brilliant comes a sunny day.
New blossoms burst and turn the tree to white,
a million tiny orbs quick turn to gold.
A tree, all weighted down with yellowed fruit
for after death, there’s rising up again.

Mountain Solitude - 02/15/09

Rock and stone bulging from hard packed core,
creating a pock marked, marble colored face,
stubbled grasses, bushes, trees clinging, clasping
to dirt filled pores forming patchwork aging skin.
Together we become a bluish globe viewed far away,
so my face would lift to you.

Inches from where I sit it is all bones and mass.
Further down all molten liquid core and fiery heat.
Places I imagine, but where I can not go
lest I set off cataclysmic storms beyond control,
like reaching into farmhouse stoves to grab at coals,
so my face would lift to you.

Squalling birds cry lonely mating calls to distant ears,
while creatures scurry past my shoes with determined
purposes known only to some great insistence.
The larger animals keep wary distance, their ears alert,
nervy messengers skittering impulses from a greater mind,
so my face would lift to you.

A tiny gathering of chipping birds flock 'round my table,
beggars searching for the crumbs they pray will drop,
needs and longings overcome their fear and dread,
one drops a seed pod on my book and briefly smiles,
I thank him for his little gift and the greater gift of Love,
so my face would bow to you.