improving our collective lives, one pandemic poem at a time...
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a stray-dog-thot that bites my ankle,
saying ouch, you see a poem here?
it’s 1:14AM on a Sunday and generally I see at this generalized
pre-dawn, can’t sleep pleistocene period, non-extinct poems
roaming everywhere.
but the pandemic on my mind and giving me pause to wonder
how much can I love, and a questioner-poet needs and desires an answer,
post haste, pre apocalyptic.
S. travels for two days by airplane to fulfill a promise
only to find out, upon arrival, the promise made is
pandemic cancelled.
but the-promise-I-made silently, to her, faraway, that she never heard,
for why, stir-up-the-ruckus, asking for a visit from the evil eye,
if she falls ill, coming back to me, is stone cold stolid, no cancellation policy,
I will:
nurse her, brush her hair, anticipate the achey need normal, before she can ask,
hold my body’s warmth full and frontal, a cooling blanket for heated times,
retrieve her ***** tissues from the floor and make lousy jokes about her lousy aim.
and what I wrote, “improving our collective lives, one poem at a time,”
is here institutionalized, organized, galvanized, mesmerized,
legitimized and lionized,
proving only that stray-dog-thots @nite, they bite,
hard immediate, and that
later is never better
she would say,
“what would I do without you, my children so far away,”
my reply instanced, nuanced, instantaneously, non-Amazon delivered with a double frosted eye twinkle, no-extra-charge,
“hey! that why I get the big bucks, god’s love to deliver!”
she, a profound atheist, snorts with practiced derision, which is fine,
cause I see the welling, tear droplets, laced with viral virus communicators, smiling weakly, asking, instructing a cure:
“play for me some Janis and some Joni, some Mozart and Mahler, climb in beside me, my old man, let us, let us rock our gypsy souls, drinking a case of each other.”
who could refuse such a invitation... to become the plasma of the sun’s corona, if only for a moment
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1:38am Sunday March 15th, Twenty Twentyfold
“For Who?” (an excerpt)
by Mary Weston Fordham
Should dark sorrows make thee languish,
Cause thy cheek to lose its hue,
In the hour of deepest anguish,
Darling, then I’ll grieve with you.
Though the night be dark and dreary,
And it seemeth long to thee,
I would whisper, “be not weary;”
I would pray love, then, for thee.
Well I know that in the future,
I may cherish naught of earth;
Well I know that love needs nurture,
And it is of heavenly birth.
But though ocean waves may sever
I from thee, and thee from me,
Still this constant heart will never,
Never cease to think of thee.
__________________________
Mary Weston Fordham was born around 1843. She ran her own school during the Civil War and worked as a teacher for the American Missionary Association. She is the author of Magnolia Leaves (Tuskegee Institute, 1897) and died in 1905.
