Writing on the Wall

Trace chalk dust memorializes

my childhood blackboard. Washable, 

no-muss markers replace broken 

crayons in tin cans in my old 

Chicago brick school house.

Capital and lower-case cursive 

letters on my elementary class 

walls pushed penmanship, no 

longer required by tech teaching 

and digitized communication.

I input my password on today’s

screen to catch news bytes, poke

family and friends, travel to virtual 

Ireland, and print anything – guns to 

gowns, from my 3D printer. The only

scene that hasn’t changed since 

I was a Windy City school girl is 

the news – Russian-American tension, 

Arab-Israeli conflict, world hunger, 

end-of-the-world pollution. Will there

be an app developed to fix 

the human condition?

© Patsy Asunción, 2018

Abandoned school in New Orleans
Photo by Tiffany Bailey
from Wikimedia Commons

Oz Dreams

Oz is the land

we dream of

on nights when giants stalk

the gloomy woods,

and wicked witches wait

beyond the curve of the yellow brick road.

Dorothy, sturdy and ever cheerful,

braves the terrors lurking there,

giving courage

to orphans everywhere.

© Peg Latham,  2016

Haitian orphans after the 2010 earthquake
Photo by Marcello Casal Jr, for Agência Brasil, a public Brazilian news agency
from Wikimedia Commons

To My Father on His 100th Birthday

The bent wood of the empty highchair

Darkens each year, even though the caning

Holds up against the long-departed weight

Of your tiny body crying out for its first

Solid foods, even as the influenza raged

Around you and the bodies piled up.

My sister posts a photograph I’ve never seen,

You in your grandfather Lucius’s arms, 

Grandmother Frances stiffly looking on 

In her dark full length dress, the wood

Paneling dark and your father’s darkness

Not yet revealed in his downward loving gaze.

Your eyes alone look outward their innocence

Unfocused on any of the hammers fated later

To fall, your father’s becoming a stockbroker

In 1928, your wife’s madness, your daughter’s

Crib death, the corporate world’s finding

That you were another expendable engineer.

The wondrous light in your eyes appears now

To forgive it all in advance, under your father’s

Eyes saying silently I have made something good

Even though twelve years later he would put

His head in the oven, and thereafter would smoke

Himself to death while you sailed sea and sky.

The walls you built left a shadow so far behind

The scrim of unwanted memory that it is only

Now that I can see him, standing there at thirty

In bright tie and rounded collar tips his gaze

And his father’s gaze on you and your eyes

Only now, in a century’s blink, are my eyes.

© Bill Prindle, 2018

van Campen family portrait in a landscape
by Frans Hals, with the baby lower left
added by Salomon de Bray
Toledo Museum of Art
from Wikimedia Commons

THE CITY OF LIGHT—PARIS AGAIN—NOVEMBER 2015

Now we are a tear in the shape of a person—

a tear that screams.

Or maybe we are a blood-drop who is a person—

blood that wails

and walks or rather stumbles

upon our planet formed

to be a blood-drop, a teardrop,

and the entire planet is screaming.

The planet and we, made for one another,

are pain moving upon pain.

The planet floats, reels

upon a foundation

that is not a noble elephant,

a patiently pleasant turtle,

or the dependable shoulders of Atlas.

The planet floats, reels

upon perhaps sounder foundation—

whole horror.

Now we know that there are Believers

who adore horror.

Those Believers may rejoice

when joy is destroyed,

supposedly convinced

that the only purity is pollution,

cruelty the sole permissible cult,

death the one true faith.

So the soul, like the Earth,

attains the purity of worshipped pollution.

Terror thus may compose reality,

and a screaming tear, a drop that is a person,

will not be heard.

Who among gods in the depths of height

can concoct help, healing, wellness?

Has hope been conceived yet,

a mirror in the void to answer

our own agonized shining?

And yet, despite terror, we do shine at times,

a shape, a drop trained by love,

that survives by shining

for the sake of shining.

The curve of a tear may be defined therefore

as a smile, a smiling blood-drop.

Are we brave enough to re-invent fun

as wellness inconceivable

by its well-trained killers?

Is killing the same as believing?

Somewhere, Someone has conceived of purity

that is fun, which is not pollution.

“Those Believers want to destroy

the things worth living for—

food, wine, friends.” 

© Stephen Margulies, 2017

Christmas Illumination Champs-Elysées, Paris
Photo by Didier Boy de la Tour;
Koert Vermeulen principal lighting designer & Marcos Vinals Bassols artistic director
from Wikimedia Commons