Other Places,
Other Times
Seeing Blues
Dressed in short-sleeve blue work shirt and darker blue shorts
a scruffy man who looks like he has probably seen better days
lopes forward, his shanks an awkward inverted v, dragging
what looks like a stripped tree branch that is taller than him.
With a tattered American flag fastened near its top, he keeps
this makeshift pole upright beside him. A breeze bellies the flag's
upper blue ground and its white stars out above his right shoulder,
but in the area below the red and white stripes are merest shreds.
Like the man, the space he walks through looks disordered.
Above, puffy white clouds hang framed with varied shades of blue.
Behind him, on the left, a blue frame house with white eaves
leans left as it sinks slowly down into the Choupique Bayou.
This poem, a concerned witness, wants him to be someplace else soon.
Somewhere life is good, the winds are calm, and hurricanes never come.
A Prayer
I rose early, early in the morning
with the sky caped in black
the birds still asleep under the spell
of a cloudless, cool Spring night.
It felt easy, easy in those moments
while alone in the silent woods
absorbed in their own green growing
to avoid being caught in the usual churn.
I paced slow, slow by a stream like
a serrated knife: straight on one side
beneath a rock overhang but notched
here, opposite, by vagaries of flow.
O to stay long, long in those quiet moments,
those not looked for simple gifts gone now,
and have all that heart hoped then:
a life well lived.