Advent Rosary

Dark Advent is a silent waiting time
When autumn chills into pale, year-end days
And joy seems smothered by hard-frosting rime:
Cold is the debt that spring to winter pays

The seasons link to seasons in a chain,
The chain of being that links, also, our souls,
Seasons and souls, not always without pain:
Summer’s wild lightning falls and thunder rolls.

Linked to us too, rose by mystical rose,
This holy Advent is Our Lady’s Grace
To us who wait in exile sad; she knows
Where souls and seasons sing, the Night, the Place.

Seasons and souls, linked to days dreary-dim:
Follow them with roses to Bethlehem

The Local Department Store’s Last Christmas

The overly-arranged rat-packery
Of cool-cat Christmas songs from the fifties
Descends like stardust date-expired upon
The ghosts of Christmases that never were

The aisles are teeming only with those notes
Because unlike the music of the past
Old customers have not been stored on tapes
To be replayed among the China-made

White Christmas Drummer Boy Jingle-Bell Rocks
Only mechanical air wah-wah-wah

Frost on the Windshield

Poor Kirbyville is mostly closed this morning
The cinder-block bakery is empty
And the only fast-foodery’s not yet open
Its neon tubes still dark against the stars

But the stop ‘n’ rob is busy enough
The gas pumps serving as anchorages
For trucks and boats, some headed to the lake
After taking on coffee and gasoline

And sausage-biscuits greased and slammed, and wrapped
In yellow paper of such painful sadness

For Ngo Dinh Diem

No flame eternal burns over your lost grave
Unknown beneath an hourly parking lot
Or maybe out back among the garbage cans
No guards of honor pace in mirrored boots

Forth and back in mummery choreographed
Along a field of honor’s concrete walk
No busloads of tourists leave gift-shop wreaths
No bands or speeches mark your martyrdom

Nor would you need them
Nor would you want them

For your small flame is on an Altar set

Sergeant Schultz Saw Everything

This sad world needs another Sergeant Schultz
That merry miles ponderosus who
Carried his rifle like a walking stick
And celebrated strudel instead of glory  
His innocent joy repudiated
The burning-soul ******* of war
In seeing nothing he saw everything
Through ordinary men living in hope
The liturgy of daily happiness -
This sad world needs another Sergeant Schultz

Not a Good Comrade

No man is free if he gives up himself
And disappears into sad howlingness
Subsumed in sinking, shrieking subservience
Thrall-teed in the overseer’s livery

A label on a shabby baseball cap
A programmed pixel smeared across a screen
A rusty caltrop cast into the road
A shifted pea under a shuffled thimble

As crowd, as mass, as demographic noise -
No man is free if he gives up himself

Upon Learning that the Southern Poverty Law Center Maintains an Enemies List

Does anyone maintain a list of friends?

The construction flagman who smiles and waves
The neighbor’s boy who visits for a game of chess
The Friday morning coffee commandos
The waitress who flirts with all her old men
The helpful sackboy at the grocery store
The man who repairs your air-conditioner
The nurse-practitioner who makes you all better
The crossing guard who keeps the children safe

Does anyone maintain a list of friends?