Urban Pastoral

The curtains haven't opened up all day
The little dog thrusts out a curious nose
Hoping someone new will come and play.
She settles down. The curtains slowly close.
A cat with matted hair struts up the walk,
Pauses and licks herself, then ambles by.
The nose emerges in a sudden shock
Of righteous indignation, and an eye
Glares outward with a growl. But the cat
Ignores it, wanders off, and disappears.
The nose retracts, and leaves the curtain flat
Except a corner, where two little ears
Are barely visible, to listen for
The cat, should she again threaten the door.

Imagined Horrors

The night is long and full of ghosts
Not of the dead--we vanish when we die--
But of ideas. The unimagined hosts
Flitter inanely in the daytime sky
But hover closer when the night draws in.
They try to burrow deep into our souls
Prompting our dreams of saintliness or sin
Pursuing always their own selfish goals:
To be remembered, thought, and given wing
Within a living mind. I cannot sleep
Or they will occupy my everything
And I, who never contemplate the deep
Will find myself, despite my inclination
Engaged in sudden ratiocination.

DBev

When I was twenty-three, I took his class

And when I wrote, he'd read, and he'd respond.

A twenty-three-year-old can be an ass

But he was kind, and patient, and beyond.

When I was twenty-six, we taught together

And I learned just a little of his ways;

If I can teach, then he was my bellwether

Leading with subtle hints and cautious praise.

When I was thirty-one, we met again

(He gave a talk I managed to attend);

At thirty-two, he sent a card that then

Implied I'd graduated to a friend.

The last I heard of him was that December

And all that I can do now is remember.

Devotional

Eternal God, help me to see the wrong
In what I think is right. Help me to be
The version of myself that You can see
That brings my human weaknesses along
(Recalling good does not quite equal strong)
But turns them toward the best consistently
Striving to become a better me
In whom Your image may, at last, belong.
Help me to see my flaws and never flinch
While seeing in my enemy the good
That he intends, and how he does Your will.
Let me improve my own self inch by inch
To be the person that You know I should
And in pursuit of justice never still.

Meditation

Sometimes I wonder why I worship God
And then I see the beauty in the world--
The orcas cresting in a joyful pod,
A newborn ferns first tendrils now unfurled,
A stationary stormcloud on a hill--
And I remember, for a little while.
But in the face of such enormous ill
As stalks the land, it's difficult to smile
Even at the beauty. Orcas die;
The old-growth forests where the ferns live fade;
And stormclouds dash their beauty from the sky.
Beauty lives, it seems, to be unmade.
But then the cycle of the Lord still turns:
New calves are born, and rain brings forth new ferns.

Guilt

The sea of open pain that lies between
"This isn't who we are, this isn't us"
And "this isn't who we wish that we had been"
Swallows whole expeditions without fuss.
"We don't do this." Well, actually, we did
We know (we knew, we always know) it's wrong
But that alone cannot and should not rid
Our souls of having done it. We can long
To live upon that blessed, far off shore
But oceans are not crossed by mere desire.
We must set sail: be better, and do more,
And take the fault and blame, however dire.
We may fall seasick as we turn and toss
But we must stomach it, or else not cross.

I Lift My Lamp

They didn't break the law. That shouldn't matter
Since they're still human, and we ought to care
About them all. But kindness tends to shatter
When pressed too hard, as we forget what's fair
And fall back on what's easy. Either way
They had the right to come, the right to flee,
The right to seek a future from today
(The same right we declared so holily
Two hundred years ago). They did no wrong.
We did. We do. And we continue to.
If we're a country where they don't belong
We need to change, to pledge ourselves anew
To our ideals, which we have failed before.
That's no excuse: we must and can do more.

Abortive

A woman's body ought to be her own;
Our history has struggled with this fact.
A fetus in her womb, however grown,
Is not a person, and it cannot act;
A father (and a mother) gives to her
A life, an education, and a home
She may owe them her love, but I am sure
She isn't owned despite a shared genome;
A husband, bound to her by vow and ring,
Should be a partner in the life they choose
But though they might agree on everything
He isn't her: and this should not be news.
There ought to be no need, but let's review:
A human woman is a human too.

Hello World

I find that I can write whatever here:
My words will never find the light of day
Since nobody reads sonnets anyway
My freedom is now comfortingly clear.
I can write nonsense, folderol, or queer
Misshapen things formed from my verbal clay
That crack in firing. Metaphors can stray;
It doesn't matter where they choose to veer.
Unedited, my words evaporate
And by their residue I know them pure
They leave no mark behind to indicate
I ever wrote them. And yet I am sure
Deep in my soul, their echoes resonate
In empty chambers where my heartstrings stir.

Manifest

Frontiers aren't empty. But they never were.
The basic concept that the West was Won
Requires it to be won from someone;
The New World's only new if you refer
To those who didn't know it. It's a slur
To those who did: implies that they are un-
Or less-than-human, because everyone
Who mattered was a connoisseur
Of only other lands. Columbus came
And with him death. Plagues and guns will kill
But even then the land is never void.
The bodies of the people thus destroyed
And even more those who survive it still
Deserve a presence, power, and a name.