Meeting

Meeting --

Two refugees meet in a restaurant

Clutching some broken and synthetic thing

To keep their heads above the unseen waves

Sitting beside the crooked restaurant wall,

Their architectural design defects

Are cloaked by art and painful angling  

Transformed by some resemblance of light

The porcelain tile shimmers between their knees

Their hungry smiles reveal some missing teeth

Across the hayfield mounting thunderheads

Will drop a chill as soon forgotten as

The strangeness of his hand upon her back

LFM

Keeping Faith With the Dead

Keeping Faith with the Dead

Memorial Day was formally established in 1868 to honor the Civil War dead.  “It is,” says the Website Memorialday.com, “about reconciliation.  It is about coming together to honor those who gave their all.”

   

The impulse to properly care for the dead is ancient.  In the 6th–5th century BCE story, Yahweh confronts Cain (Genesis 4:10) demanding, “What have you done?  Listen!  Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

In Sophocles’ ”Antigone” (440 BCE) two brothers kill each other in battle.  Their sister cannot accept that one is declared a hero buried with honors, while the other is decreed a traitor, his body left to be eaten by animals outside the city walls.  She buries her brother at the cost of her own life, declaring, “He is still my brother yes, ...I desert him not.”

John McCrae’s WWI poem “In Flanders Fields” (1915) challenges: “If you break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/in Flanders Fields.”)

Our need to care for the dead includes friend and foe.  NBC News reported, “A Massachusetts police chief begged Wednesday for help in finding a burial place for Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev… “There is a need to do the right thing," Worcester Police Chief Gary Gemme said. "We are not barbarians. We bury the dead.” 

Efforts to unite to honor the dead founder against war’s divisions. The 1868 antagonists were North / South; in 1918, interventionist / isolationist; in 1944, conscientious objectors / volunteer enlistees; In the Viet Nam era and later wars, hawks / doves and it is always between those who serve / those whose interests are served. 

 

How can honoring the dead heal living wounds?  To start, all who give their lives, like Ambassador Chris Stevens, his staff and defenders, must be honored with truth.

A Los Angeles Times editorial reprint from Memorial Day 1968 suggests what is needed is not a day but lives rightly lived.

“We would suggest that the best remembrance, the greatest tribute, we can pay those who have died in their nation's wars…is to live our own lives as citizens of this Republic, and conduct our affairs as a power in the world, according to the higher goals in whose name these sacrifices are made.

That would be tribute indeed, and surely little enough to ask.”

     

God, make our lives a tribute.  Amen.

Whys of Wow (for Susan H-S)

Whys of Wow

               (for Susan H-S)

Why does

     That sprinkler --

          Pieced together from parts

               Salvaged out of last year’s junk

                    That to begin with

                    Didn’t cost me nothing

          Now spraying an 80 foot radius

                    From a 300 foot well

                    Through a 5 horse submersible pump

                         That taps a melt-fed aquifer

                              Shared by too many retirees

          That is baptizing twenty worm-pecking

               Red winged Black Birds, one

               Pheasant hiding in the tall grass

               And my useless lawn

                    In rainbow –

Take my breath away?

Why does

               The neighbor’s fence --

                    That never holds the black and brown

                         Faced calves out of my yard

                    That threatens electric shocks

                         If I get distracted mowing

                    That reminds me of other

                         Black and brown faces

                              Pressed to fences of

                                   Electrified barbed wire –

Make tears come?

Why does

               A voice --

                         That speaks before sunrise

                               In tongues untranslatable

                                    Felt more than heard

                                    Whispered more than spoken

                                    Soft enough at the edges of the emerging earth

                                         To be submerged completely

                                              In the rising hum of bees —

Make me sing?

LFM 5/22/13

Old Unasked Questions

Old unasked questions

Run across the field

Chilling the air

Extinguishing the sun

Why in old age

Should I now long to know?

We’re settled in life’s ways

Or holding on

Beside the silent lake

Dark without moon  

Grendel is creeping

I can’t keep him out

For forty years he’s

Gnawed upon my bones

I have become addicted

To the pain

Faucets

Two faucets:

The sturdy frost free

Sashays its lever

Functional and small

Its icy stream

Requires no priming and

Accommodates no receptacle;

Beside a weathered chimney

Long and graceful as a crane

In still water  

A smooth palm-fitting handle

Sings a cast iron aria

That rising from baritone to alto

Announces the coming;

Each reminds me of you.

LFM