Poetry from Our Spring 2022 Issue

Just to Say How We Managed

after one year in isolation/Feb 2021

We often rose before the light,
Mornings after a dream-adorned sleep
had calmed the day’s swelter, or the
hushed world became encased in snow.

We drank black coffee with grace,
gently coaxing the dark from us.
A warm palmful of sublime comfort,
and the gratitude for another dawning.

We sometimes spoke of the day,
and wondered about its plan.
We confronted the news, and
offered our thanks for its distance.

We spent the first hours, attending
many matters that we knew
could just as well have waited.
Life without application is no life.

In the long afternoons,
we found our pleasures in words
assembled in books, that paid
no mind to solitude or misgivings.

We napped in a vessel of light,
two cats composed at our feet,
The sun upon shuttered eyes, still
sensing the dim of passing cloud.

As always, the hushed harmonies
of water sliding down and down,
Effortlessly finding a course beyond
impediments large and small.

We watched the steam rising up
from stone mugs of Darjeeling tea.
Music came off a dance of fingers,
and the many colors of consciousness.

While we were not paying them mind,
calendar pages meandered on their own.
The cuckoo clock we found on a square
in a Swiss storybook one lustrous day,
gathered the hours with a benevolent song.

 

The Annunciation Redux

One Saturday morning
when I was barely seven,
my mother
came to me with news.

She told me
that she was going
to have a baby.

Being the kid I was,
living a nascent life of many
questions with no answers,
I innocently asked her
how she knew that.

She said,
with great sincerity, that
that an angel
had come and told her.

At the time,
that was good enough,
for a kid about to make
his first Holy Communion.

Over time,
I realized that Mom
was not a virgin, and
that she would not be
giving birth to the Messiah.

Instead, it was just
my brother John, and
my father who was,
like the saintly Joseph,
saying nothing at all.

 

A Short Note to Blaise Pascal

Dear Blaise, might you
please forgive me for,
needing to trouble
you now with this.

But, I regret
the wager that you
have proposed, affronts
atheist bliss.

When confronting
wise philosophers,
I plead, “Apprise what
notion you’ve got”.

On the question
of divine belief,
Your answer is just
to say, “Why not?”

Sometimes the truth’s
not compatible,
To applications
math’matical.

I am willing
to confess nescience,
and do not oppose
being schooled.

But why Sir, would
any thinking man,
believe in a God
easily fooled?