Contradiction

March—an unsettling month,

unsteady,

like vultures in the air, 

tipping

this way and that.

Faults shift

in the bedrock of my core. 

My star cracks slightly, silently.

Uneasy in my bones.

Caesar knew of this.

I know of this.

I married in March,

yet March stole my husband,

and my mother.

Two surgeries

ten years apart.

One took a failed child, 

the other all hope of another.

Both March.

This morning, early March, 

a pair of Wood Ducks

emerged from the murky 

shadows of the pond

to float in the sunlight.

  © Jenny Gaden, 2017

Turkey vulture
Photo by Bob Peterson from North Palm Beach, FL
from Wikimedia Commons

Price Range

All grown-ups were children first. (But 

few remember it.)

                ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

The one-of-a-kind heirloom

under glass is roped off,

a proper distance

from museum onlookers

who afford a pocket-sized price

to applaud, not hold

dear to heart,

trumpeted treasure.

The search for fulfilling riches

at reasonable cost

overflows to streets

onto big-box stores and back-alley

vendors with knock-off deals.

Possessions glitter the path to satisfied

heartbeats despite night’s

isolation.

Having more seems happier

for many adults.

Once they’ve outgrown Neverland,

men and women get painted over

by agendas,

forget how to feed themselves 

with hearty nourishment freely given

by fairies, pirates, and mermaids.

Lost from to-do lists is one-of-a-kind Pan, 

clad in skeleton leaves

and juices that flow from trees, 

who keeps his heart forever young.

© Patsy Asunción, 2017

 Pan and Wendy, cover, 1915
from Wikimedia Commons

Joshua’s Choice

If you choose you lose.

The chosen is yours but

What of the rest?

Did you pick the best?

When Joshua fit Jericho,

Think of the mess.

When the walls with great clatter

Begot fragments of matter,

Perhaps he frowned as he pondered his choice,

Thinking of his military budget

And the union demands of the horn-players,

And all that debris-clearing overtime for the deconstruction battalions.

He could have chosen ladders,

Or gate-busting rams to batter,

Or just shovels to tunnel beneath the dust-laden mud brick,

His men then springing up in the midst of the enemy

Like poisonous night-mushrooms after a rain.

But he took the traditional option,

Slaughtering every living thing within the sweep of the tumbled walls,

Not even selling the captured civilians at slave-auction,

Save Rahab the Prostitute. 

She must have been given many horns to toot.

Who can say?

Another choice might have yielded less suffering

And given Rahab

A day or two of buffering.

© George Phillips, 2017

The Fall of Jericho
Illustration from a Bible card published in 1901
by the Providence Lithograph Company
from Wikimedia Commons