Extra Large 200th Birthday

 

Extra Large 200th Birthday

Let’s gather my children,
their partners, their offspring—
shades of hair, skin, eyes, a palette of DNA
mixing cultures and continents.

Let’s celebrate first by repairing the deck,
a carpenter’s holiday
prying, cutting, screwing until suddenly
I trip on the crowbar and
I’m falling in front of everybody
fortunately sideways onto soft grass.
Thunk.
I’m fine, slightly bruised,
dug a divot in the lawn and
everyone now reminded that 70 is old age,
judgement possibly addled.
They say I took fetal position on the way down,
good instinct, a carpenter’s regression.

Family tradition: a pie not a cake.
Gift of a sweater vest, size Extra Large.
I’m a man of medium build, but always
in their eyes Extra Large.

One candle, only one
because 70 would melt the pie
and counting physical body years
misses the point. We are spirit
expanding as ripples in a pond
beyond the flesh. Add up our ages.
My years plus children plus grandchildren
total exactly 200 years old this day.
I’m spreading, not dying.
Happy birthday to us.

…..

First published in Poetry Breakfast—thank you editor Kay Kestner
Photo by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay

Note: my 200th birthday was August 19, 2017. Today — August 19, 2024 — we are 256 years old.

Crab or Seagull

 

Crab or Gull

In the swash zone
a desperate crab somehow overturned,
belly-up. Dome-backed, helpless,
she twitches feet and claws
grasping only air
as seagulls gather, smacking lips.

Shall I intervene?
Who do I favor, crab or gull?
Frankly I have problems with both personalities.

Can’t ignore a creature in distress.
(Who programmed that?)
Wiggle my toes into damp sand
beneath the beast. Flip.

With nary an acknowledgement, crab scuttles
sideways to a spot in the wave wash
where in a flutter of little legs
she half-buries herself, eyeballs above.
Seagulls scream curses.

What did I expect, a thank you?

…..

From my book Foggy Dog
First published in Your Daily Poem—thank you editor Jayne Jaudon Ferrer

Memory of Moss

 

Memory of Moss

Through dense forest she guides me
to a wall of stones piled waist-high,
boulders lifted by black hands
in a land of white winters.

Caleb a slave escaped Virginia
to the Adirondack Mountains,
cleared 40 acres of northern jungle
axing tree, rolling rock, ton upon ton.
Caleb, her ancestor. In my whiteness
she wants me to understand.
In my infatuation, I try.

Caleb scratched out a living
no child would choose.
Slavery, they said, would be easier.
Not better, but warmer and less work.
It was family legend, a bitter family joke.
Abandoned fields reverted to birch, to maple,
then finally to conifer, the natural crop.

Boreal rainforest seems untouched
if not for this soft-spoken wall.
She swears she can hear slice of Caleb’s axe,
grunt of mule, echoes from a century plus a half.
In these crevices she can sniff
smears of his sweat, stains of his blood.

Stones break loose, tumble among duff.
“Roots topple walls,” she says touching my hand.
Shooing a lizard she gathers bits of moss
to stack in a jar like little green toupees
we carry back to the dirt road, the SUV,
the long easy drive to the suburbs.

…..

First published in Freshwater
photo by Willi Heidelbach

Flying Fire

 

Flying Fire

Granny tells how fireflies
would rise every evening
blinking like air glitter—

Except one evening,
it was the fifth of August
at 7:15 PM in Maryland time
which was the sixth of August
at 8:15 AM in Japan—
each and every bug went dark.

And Granny (a little girl back then)
wondered if it happened all over the world
or just that one lawn she saw from the glider
on the front porch but every lightning bug
went dark and never lit again that night.

What do fireflies know?
That was the moment (she learned only later)
when the atom bomb obliterated Hiroshima
and of course the bugs are simply mating
just like people do (she chuckles)
that’s why they flash.

…..

First published in Halfway Down the Stairs