Monday, January 22, 2018

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




Monday, January 15, 2018

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

Monday, January 8, 2018

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

Monday, January 1, 2018

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