John Paul Satre could have written it; a play about these times.
The Greek banks are closed on Holiday and Greeks all stand in line.
Sixty Euros if you’re lucky, that’s the limit for the day.
The Greeks are running out of Euros, and I’m afraid there’s Hell to pay.
The people have rejected Merkel’s plan to be austere,
And so the leftist government might finish out the year.
Printing Drachmas in the basement has to be their back up plan;
as they make their graceful Grexit may their creditors be dammed.
Will Brussels send the Wehrmacht in to seize crops in the fields?
You can only squeeze an olive once; there’s a limit on the yield.
This isn’t debt that they can pay the pundits have opined.
The can cannot be kicked again, this was the final time.
Italy and Portugal both wait with bated breath;
Along with Spain they want to see what Brussels will do next.
Greece is a small country, one with a pleasant clime.
What happens next is what you’d expect of Dominos in line.

“It’s a great life if you don’t weaken. “My aunt Helen did confide.
She is somewhere north of eighty-four and never someone’s bride.
Her beau died in Korea, died to keep our country free,
“ At least that was the pious pap they tried to sell to me.”
So she lived a solitary life, watching horses round the rail.
She would hang around casinos too, the reason she’s so pale.
“There are no pockets in those things.” She told me at a wake.
“so you won’t catch me sitting home, that’s a big mistake.”
In these later years she might enjoy a second glass of wine.
She is fiercely independent; she is a good friend of mine.
So, if now and then thoughts scatter and she tells a tale again.
I smile and listen patiently. We all get there in the end.

My mother was a little girl when the Western Union man
Put the dreaded telegram in my grandmother’s hand.
It said that my grandfather would not be coming home.
It told her that she’d have to raise my mother all alone.
Grandfather was honored, in death, for his service overseas;
the Medal of Honor, we still have, awarded  posthumously.

We thought that his remains were lost, committed to the sea.
Just one of many thousands who have died to keep us free.
Then recently, I traveled to the island where he died;
A mass grave had been discovered with some brave marines inside.
They found a tattered uniform that dressed grandfather’s bones.
Emotion overwhelmed me as I thought: “He’s coming home.”
In Sante Fe, New Mexico he’ll rest with all his kin.
Guns will fire in salute; they’ll fold a flag for him.
They’ll place it in my mother’s hands; his little girl grown old,
For her hero who died long ago on the Betio atoll.

You departed this life towards the end of July, Thirty four summers gone by.
We speculate that your heart or a stroke was the cause, but we can only surmise.
There were no farewells, no anguished goodbyes; In the middle of dreaming you died.
It was subtle the way angels bore you away; quiet as a wind borne sigh.

It has come to our attention that your License was suspended-
for failing to stop, within lines, for needed punctuation.
Your casual allusions to things and times of yore
Are confusing to the reader, and frankly mark you as a bore.
Your long winded analogies sometimes beggar all belief,
though some here think that your intent is comical relief.
All attempts at alliteration have been something of a dud;
You fall in love with the technique and sound like Elmer Fudd.
Your recent "Ode to Flatulence" using onomatopoeia
was but the latest instance of your verbal diarrhea.
Your metaphors are pitiful and this committee looks askance
at your evident confusion of mere lust with true romance.
Still, we are both kind and merciful (as bureaucrats tend to be) ,
So we'll renew you for another year upon remittance of the fee.

He stared at the words on the paper-
at least a dozen times.
At last he gave a little laugh and said.
“I can’t recall if these are mine.
I recognize a familiar style; a well-worn rhyming scheme.
Perhaps I may have written this back when still a teen.”
Beneath his façade of outward calm, I thought that I espied
a too familiar horror in his bespectacled eyes.
I saw the fear of loss of self, of dignity, of mind.
A brilliant wit now silenced, aware of its decline.
His mind was like a drowning man who panics in the brine;
eluding would be rescuers, going down for the third time.
He handed back the paper and I was too kind to say
that this was the piece of verse he finished yesterday.
Forget me not, It seemed to say. Please don’t leave me behind,
although the better part of me has died before my time.

It was hidden in the attic, they kept it carefully veiled.
To them it was a symbol, to others, just a rag.
Its’ field was all a crimson red, criss- crossed with stripes of blue.
Upon the blue; eleven stars; the confederacy they knew.

In the stars and bars are memories of numerous campaigns.
It was grand-Sire’s battle flag he’d rescued from the flames.
On the battlefields of glory; it’s said something remains,
But, to those ignorant of the past, I fear they are but names.

Some see it as the symbol of the hated KKK
Who used both rope and fire to take blacks’ rights away.
It’s a symbol of white supremacy, lower it they say
How can Black lives matter in the States where it holds sway?

Our country has a checkered past, to all who are not blind.
To our ethnic minorities we have been less than kind.
Yet to be fair, it was white men who fought to break those chains.
No other race in history, so far, can make that claim.

The soldiers bodies are now but dust, disturb not their remains
I don’t wish to repeat the past; I hope you feel the same.
We must not forget their story; a curse on all who try.
Six hundred thousand, Blue and Gray, were quite enough to die.