willows,
and patches of lawn around two flower beds.
The willow buds were breaking,
promising early leaves.
Dust crusted the flower beds.
The grass was still winter amber.
The melody conjured the sun
smiling through the rain.
It tugged at corners of me
I had not visited in a long while.
Faded denim covered his lean strength.
Storm cloud grays speckled
his obsidian hair.
Living had carved characters
in his face and around his eyes.
His brown eyes looked
beyond the Zocolo.
I stopped to listen
until he closed his song
with a quiet phrase.
He looked at me and nodded,
shook the spit from his flute,
put it in his pack and walked away.
I stayed, and listened to the wind
whisper to the willows
until my corners
settled into place again.
The Rare Quiet
It has come
so unexpected,
this rare quiet.
The house is so still
I can hear the clock
tick in the kitchen.
The wind is soft;
it hardly moves
the young green leaves
in the cherry tree.
The petals cling
secured to the branches.
All the children
must be asleep.
The neighbor dogs
nap in the shade.
Under the silence
the pigeons mutter
some foreboding.
On a distant street
a siren screams.
Dogs tatter the stillness with their barking.
The angry pigeons
fly with a rasp
of beating wings
into the wind
rattling the trees.
Soon the children
will shriek and laugh
in the streets and yards.
The rare quiet
was ah! so brief.
A Certain Lady
In the shadowy hall
she stopped me,
her hand on my arm.
“Never tell!” she said,
and squeezed my wrist.
She turned and ran.
She never told me
what to keep
eternally secret.
She just told me,
“Never tell!”
squeezed my wrist,
and left me to wonder
in the empty hall.
For Friends in an Old Snapshot
I’d stored the photo
long years back.
It belongs to a summer
before the plague
burned you away.
It shows you on the beach
playing volleyball.
I watched you shrivel
forty years too soon
and die distorted
like sheets of paper
curled to ash
in a fire.
That’s how I remembered you,
your faces pillowed
on plastic tubes,
your eyes
staring at a void.
I’d forgotten
you played
beach volleyball.
Invitation
Shut the door against the wind.
I smell snowflakes on its breath.
Take a chair beside the fire.
Pour yourself a glass of wine.
It’s cranberry. I made it myself.
Don’t add ginger ale or soda.
Tonight you need the alcohol.
Swirl it in your glass a little,
to start the bubbles. The fecund yeast
sings such harmonies with the juice!
Drink up, good friend. I’ve more on hand.
Nothing stops old age or winter,
or so a wise man told me once,
but wine, he said, mellows both.
Generations
“Why do you dance, old man,
in the light of a neon moon?
I hear the creak of your joints
you’re out of sync with the beat
and you’re not pretty to look at.
Your belly gyrates like pudding.
You wobble like a top
running out of spin.
Why do you dance, old man?”
“Because I can, young man,
here where the neon moon
glitters on the asphalt.
Because I can, I dance,
and if the beat escapes me,
the drummer in my belly
keeps rhythms I understand.
I dance because I can.”
“Why do you whirl, little girl,
your arms stretched out and your hair
tangling in the wind?
You’re like a butterfly
lost between the flowers.
Why do you spin, little girl,
spurning your lessons and chores?
The world is made for the serious;
the frivolous lose the prize.
Why do you whirl, little girl?”
“I whirl, old woman, to praise
the moon and sun and wind.
I whirl and spin to see
the stars in my head
rock and roll with the song
of the spheres and suns that dance
in the dark of the universe.
I turn and turn to make
my skirts fly in circles.
I whirl, old woman, because
the universe is a song
and I love to sing along.”
A Trio of Triolets
When I cut an orange rose
and pinned it in my hair,
I wore my gypsy dancing shoes.
When I cut an orange rose
I donned my jester’s clothes.
There was laughter everywhere
when I cut an orange rose
and pinned it in my hair.
The yellow rose was in bud
and I was playing the fool
with a flower on my head.
The yellow rose was in bud
and all the others said
my foolery was very droll.
The yellow rose was in bud
and I was playing the fool.
When the day grew dark with rain
the others ran away.
I danced alone with disdain.
When the day grew dark with rain
I made a daisy chain
and threw my rose away.
When the day grew dark with rain
the others ran away.
Harp and Willows
I hang my harp among the willows
to let the wind play tunes.
The fingers of the wind are agile.
My old fingers are weak and thin.
The wind plays merry Irish reels
and Scottish border ballads.
I dance arthritic minuets
with swaying willow branches.
I dance until the rising moon
hushes the plucking wind,
shakes the silver dust from its blankets,
and puts the stars to bed.
Love Song
Never tell me how or when
he became your golden boy.
Come and kiss me once again.
Leave me then and go away.
Love affairs are lisping tourneys,
wayside wars on tedious journeys;
Be gone,
dear man,
before the coral clouds of dawn.
Go without a final scene.
Dead love seldom entertains.
Sorrows seldom linger long.
They soon drown in tomorrow’s pains.
Go and laugh with your golden other.
Life without you is no bother.
We’re smart
to part
before we scar each other’s heart.
White Asters
You gather white asters and purple begonias,
and bring them to me to beguile me from grieving.
Be kind to me, lady, and leave me to weeping.
Woe is my lover, my constant companion,
he fills my tomorrows with familiar sadness.
My tears are the liquor that quenches my thirsting,
my sighs are the bread that diminish my hunger,
so take them away, your bouquets of comfort.
Their purple and white distract me from sorrowing.
Kate Nein Remembers 1917
There were no lilacs blooming
when we left the Volga for Berlin.
We lived five weeks on cabbages
a trainman stole and sold us.
We couldn’t leave the train
because the Bolsheviks would shoot us.
Somewhere in Poland we smelled
lilacs through the smell of sickness.
We wept because our world
was shrunk to sickness in a boxcar.
The trainman brought some lilacs.
He gave them to me for a kiss,
and because my hair was coiled
in a yellow bun like his sister’s.
I planted lilacs when I came
to live free in this country.
Every May I bring some in
to remember the world is more
than smelling sickness in a boxcar.
Easter Monday, 2002
Tanks in Bethlehem. Tanks in Ramallah.
Blood reddens Netanya and Nablus streets,
running between the paving stones,
sinking through the asphalt cracks
to merge with the blood of yesteryear.
The god-besotted claim the land,
each convinced of his creed’s perfection,
each convinced the other’s creed
is something evil beyond description,
and bent on martyrdom to prove it.
Their war-tornado feeds on itself,
revenge supplying fuel for revenge.
Whatever gods receive this worship
are either appalled with it, or demons
who rejoice in human self-destruction.
On Easter Monday, a day of Passover,
all the prelates who prattled of peace,
rabbis and mullahs and priests alike,
wag their chins and wail against
the darkness in the human soul.
Other clerics howl for war,
howl with manic glee to see
the flowing blood that soaks the stones.
The stones keep silent, waiting for rain
and the oblivion of man.
Road Kill—A Villanelle
Vultures swoop from sun-bruised skies.
Something dead lies in the road,
a flattened host to beetles and flies.
Bits of fur and flesh and eyes
broil on the asphalt, while overhead
vultures swoop from sun-bruised skies.
See the heat waves dance and rise
from the corpse stuck in sticky red,
a flattened host to beetles and flies.
A lizard at the roadside shies
from the copper smell of sun-cooked blood.
Vultures swoop from sun-bruised skies
to peck a share of the carrion prize,
the shapeless smear lying spread,
a flattened host to beetles and flies.
One wonders if God ever sighs
over this bloody bit of road
where vultures swoop from sun-bruised skies;
on a flattened host to beetles and flies.
October 7, 2001
And so it begins again.
Out of the darkness of humans
blossoms a fell green light
on a murky screen.
Pray we do right.
Pray we understood
when we determined we had
no other way to do this.
God, if You are,
guard the