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The path strewn with hurdles and gravels
40 years is a long way to travel
Two souls sewn with love and peace
Two hearts dipped in bliss
Two minds not always in same strength
But determined within to walk the length.

40 years of building the nest
Patience and endurance put to hard test
Before one day the saplings become a tree
Heart upon heart two becomes three
Through fall and rise and sun downpour
Years flew as the three becomes four.

It's no easy work to raise a family
In all sadness live strong and happily
Blocks are thrown doubts are cast
Moments of life try to break the trust
But we didn't bow continued the thrive
A grownup family now, we number five.
40 years together
  Jul 2024 Poetoftheway
Nat Lipstadt
All our senses concatenate, building on each other

<>

this interplay is truly interplanetary,
for each of us a unique solar system,
our brains,
intricacy literally personified,
and our five senses, working
in
concatenation
our long range sensors, busy bees compiling inputs
by the nanosecond second, distilling, integrating.
blending and then reconstructing…into a whole!

a gentle breeze ruffles the hair,
the tree swing rises and flows
of its own accord, no passported
passenger required, and a neighbor’s
American Flag, moves majestically &
impressively, whipping, dancing, yes, prancing
to a tune only it can hear,
the syncopated air currents providing
a rhythmic awesome inspiring beat…


and the brain takes this all in, a momentary
second of a vista that is constantly flexing,
yet remains unchanged, a muscular view
of a real world, living but yet immutable,
and I utter thanks to my motor functions,
that bless me with the eyes to perceive,
the nostrils to smell sea salt flavored air,
the hearing ears that the know the imperceptible
orchestrations of silences by their absence
and their intrusion, and I touch my fingertips
to my tongue, wetted, and hyper sensitized
to that gentle breeze that decorates the
landscapes external,

and the combinatory
addition of the all of it, into a single momentary
poem of recall, what I “knew” yesterday, & will
greet again this coming day, as an old unfamiliar
friend, who grasps me entire, and proclaims:
this is living…and the greatest satisfaction that
a speck of mortal can achieve, retain and
through impoverished words…share


4:14am
Mon Jul 22
2 0 2 4
a single moment recalled… forever
  Jun 2024 Poetoftheway
Nat Lipstadt
~with thanks to T. Riddle for the inspiring photos~

there are color photos of budding nascent fruits,
an unexpected delivery to the eye’s inbox
exuding new youthfulness in
variegated shades of green
and

solitary ant traveler on a leafy space shuttle,
making its way, crossing galaxies
drinking from eye-drop seas
living off the land
and

life bursting out unreservedly asking for
no favors, nor recompense but to
breath, drink of soil nutrients,
to live to give back more
than it takes
and

to be chosen, plucked, torn from its environs,
to be the fruit of sustenance and a
delivery system to pass on its
****, tasty, enhanced flavors,
its seeded progeny the
chance to same
and

the ant travels on and about fearless,
its mini-size and sure footed body
leaping leaf to leaf to live and
to be fruitful and
multiply
and

multiple multipurposed prayers multiply,
of human origin, as humans blink at the
new-life miracles repetitious, wistfully
wishing every prayer, could be
answered thusly so lusciously
but

this it cannot be always, so we accept
as best we can, small proofs,
of regeneration, life eternal,
wetting browned, dark
soil with blotches of
salty damp-tears
encased within a
moment~eased
hopeful heart
7:52am
Sabbath Sat.
June 8
2024
Poetoftheway Jun 2024
Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.
Our bodies are our gardens,
to which our wills are gardeners…”

      – Iago, Act 1, Scene 3 in Shakespeare's "Othello


A commandment to wellness,
spoke aloud, with resolute foursquare,
of which no doubt,
upon whom the responsibility lays,
each of us poets individually

I am not a gardner,
know not the pleasure of rich dark soil
loam, cupped in my hand,
or the stroking of first blooms,
the genteel of  spring,
afternoon delights for the eyes,
but for me, no elemental quivering
no instinct bids me
dig, plant, water and worry…


but my body’s garden another matter
for pillaging insects,
the bollwevil
and other assorted devils
planted internally and infernally
breeding
the ills of human failings,
with tulip yellow couragelessness,
they infiltrate & exploit
the crevices where our fallacies
buried but unearthed

what is this longevity word?

we've live as long as intended,
forces internal,
weathered by outside forces,
gales amazing and pelting storms
within and without
combative

born from earth’s produce,
we tend our own garden unequally,
inconsistently  
though gardens demand, preferring
constantly
li
loving attentions

*but humans are notoriously of poor
attention spans and we tend to tend
in spurs of moments,
some lasting decades

and thus or thus,
a poor epitaph to
our fallow falling fallen
humanity
  Jun 2024 Poetoftheway
Nat Lipstadt
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more”
(Henry V, by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE)

Morning into Mourning

<>

I speak it softly, for though battlefield is steeped in quietude
of the lively greenery, endless lawns of healing fields
surrounded by multitudinous shades of blue waters,
my eyes piercing , joining in
as sunrising separates the veil
dividing light from dark, new from prior,
a went-before and a
soon-to-be
and a familiar-what-to-be-hereafter,
but a skyed breech it is,
with sun ray stairs inviting my
upright ascension into this newness

Welcoming the exposure of my trembling, though it is not fear that causes my shaking, but the colored warmth barely warming, yet,
stoking, stroking the drape of chill
away, away! from my night-sealed pores

the majestic surfacing of the waters peinture impasto, with its roughened but genteel thick, dabs, dots, swirls, swishes belie the overall atmosphere of calm it conveys, and Shakespeare’s rallying cry of men rises to the mind forefront, for the bay is my battlefield,
the day’s new light the breeching of the sky’s
envelopment of our world, summons to rise and
step forward intimately into the tableau of morning

into the breech, into the unknown,
to lift one more poem from breast,
shed tears of welcome, and death fears banished,
a battle to the unknown from the foretold past,
and, but


you shout
no!
<>
tis a day like all others,
of rectitude sans gratitude
another quantity of known drudgery, another,
“Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup”

The breach is within me,
a splitting of the head,
laid flat out upon my desk,
writing down scrupulously
officiously,
the same figures inconsequentially,
letters deranged, daily merely rearranged,
prison vista,steel and glass appearing with
the same exactitude of every day ever prior,
the sun invisible, the unceasingly unchanging
dark deep of the shadowy of manmade canyons…

speak to us no more of views, vistas,
but the fistulae, the empty places
where interconnected dots and dash’s,
light and ombre blends of dark ochre  
gradations of bland de~gray~ding
are our time’s patchworks of familiarity,
cursed with annualized daily reciprocity,
a *** for a tat,
a woolen watch cap,
a  black Balaclava,
drawn over our heads
lest the drudgery be too readily apparent!


<>
mere mortal am I,
mortal wounded by our disparate
and desperate differing points
of view,
and we split ourselves in two,
hoping for a way forward of
reconciliations,
successful hostage negotiations,
pushing these contradictions,
back inside my heads,
until confronted
once again,
and find new words coming,
to bind me of the divisions between
or even,
to blind
me to the gaps between
my left and right
brain.

for I am both men,
one and the same,
forever
battling


until the morrow, then…
morning into mourning
June 14 2024
tween 3:30 AM ~ 10::00 AM
fitful sleep, fistfuls of vision's pieces
  Jun 2024 Poetoftheway
Nat Lipstadt
the propulsion of compulsion is indefatigable,
it cannot no more, be ignored, as if it is forming
a holy commandment, number 11, you must
write when so ordered, denial is temporary
i n s a n i t y, and the backlog of nuances be
comes longer and longer by the instant

the provocateurs, them eyes, those eyes,
even the ears and tongue join in to instigate,
the cabal of influencers who peddle no product,
demand no payment but total obeisance and
sometimes low-class instant fufillment, for here
I am in servitude,@ 4:33am, by dawn’s early light
(no **** for real), propelled and compelled by
the creative, the spilling urgency of the need
to expel notions of potions that flit between the

frontal lobe, parietal lobe, cingulate gyrus,
and prefrontal cortex: (I told  you, it’s a cabal!)
all  firing
up neurons like electron spark plugs, and only
I can see the sparks colliding inside as letters,
words, phrases, none lazy, all demand long life,

or the Perpetuity of the Momentary”

it grows lighter by the minute and the sporadic
lights across the bay wink morse code secrets
to the observant, and Noyac’s  tree line has
become a distinguishable and distinctive
land mass to which I crossed last nite via &
upon the South Ferry, when all these conflicting
concepts began a painful birthing delivery,
the coagulation of the flighty, merging and
transforming into my child, in my bed, through
the picture window that has so oft been complicit
in the ganging up on my very, very old and restless
brain

but, uh, this ecrivez, this motion that the momentum
of the momentary desiring & deserving of monuments
to the perpetual
won’t be stilled and hours later, with it’s invisible hands
around my throat, it yanks from within what did not
exist ten minutes prior, but always existed inside me
as a jumbled puzzle, gestating quietly till a swift kick
of birthing pains insufferable accompanied by her
raucous dreams, awoke me from ******* and rhyming
Rem Sleep, to now, this moment, named forever as
4:57am and this noisy newborn, covered in embryonic
fluid (wonderful but disgusting really) is all ready pealing and peeling
off suggestions for brothers and sisters, this arrogance
is untenable, but the babe laughs at me, for it knows that
there are hidden, voluminous files of titles awaiting their
turning time of final conception

no longer nighttime, an early forming day, it too,
covered in its own fluidity, awaits discovery, for
the lights from across the bay have gone to bed,
turned off but the greatest, more powerful
brighter discharges
of the Sun Gods

The Bay’s waters are still, though my woman is not,
muttering, still dreaming out loud, as if she wishes
to foment
turbulence, and desires a boat for safe conveyance
across the dark seas of the night to the searing bright
June summer day that the Greek seers have forecast,
and then that moment, like it’s older sibling, will demand,
it’s very moment of personalized perpetuity, its own
unique naming,
a full recording, a welcoming by the Preservation Band,
amidst the glory of its mother mornings colorings of
palest blues, puffery of cumulus whitiwhispers all tinged
in my favorite, flavored color, creamsicle orange,
and the calming power is self evident for the rustling
back and forth of raucous dreams have ceased, and I too
am no longer possessed by the moment, until soon
when the hands creep slow round my throat by a new
moment, and all is lost, all is gained and a newest poem
is brought from the womb of my ancient past, my currency
of the next minutes and the wealth of words that are
available to us all! demands one of us, perhaps you?
to commit its actualized existence into reality

I bid you a soft adieu, for the chores of existence
those demanding pests of drudged biblical
pestilence
can no longer be kept
waiting

nml
5:21am
Sun Jul 16
2024

writ at you know where…
writ in the “moment”
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