"labored" poems
Day-colored wine,
night-colored wine,
wine with purple feet
or wine with topaz blood,
wine,
starry child
of earth,
wine, smooth
as a golden sword,
soft
as lascivious velvet,
wine, spiral-seashelled
and full of wonder,
amorous,
marine;
never has one goblet contained you,
one song, one man,
you are choral, gregarious,
at the least, you must be shared.
At times
you feed on mortal
memories;
your wave carries us
from tomb to tomb,
stonecutter of icy sepulchers,
and we weep
transitory tears;
your
glorious
spring dress
is different,
blood rises through the shoots,
wind incites the day,
nothing is left
of your immutable soul.
Wine
stirs the spring, happiness
bursts through the earth like a plant,
walls crumble,
and rocky cliffs,
chasms close,
as song is born.
A jug of wine, and thou beside me
in the wilderness,
sang the ancient poet.
Let the wine pitcher
add to the kiss of love its own.
My darling, suddenly
the line of your hip
becomes the brimming curve
of the wine goblet,
your breast is the grape cluster,
your ******* are the grapes,
the gleam of spirits lights your hair,
and your navel is a chaste seal
stamped on the vessel of your belly,
your love an inexhaustible
cascade of wine,
light that illuminates my senses,
the earthly splendor of life.
But you are more than love,
the fiery kiss,
the heat of fire,
more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.
I like on the table,
when we're speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.
Drink it,
and remember in every
drop of gold,
in every topaz glass,
in every purple ladle,
that autumn labored
to fill the vessel with wine;
and in the ritual of his office,
let the simple man remember
to think of the soil and of his duty,
to propagate the canticle of the wine.
27.2k
spring planting, spring harvesting, spring garlic
One of the great joys of having a job in agriculture
is to think days, weeks, even months ahead,
One of the great joys of having a job in poetry,
like a fireman, a patient planter of love,
you wait to be called,
then becoming by being,
part of an all consuming burning
come spring, take advantage of the cool, wet weather of spring
to put in multiple crops of peas and lettuce, also a great time
to get your perennial vegetables,
like asparagus and rhubarb, started
the planting cycle is not an either/or,
come harvest thy labored fruits,
nine crops to harvest come March,
kale, pick leaves as needed,
leeks, best left in the ground
and harvested as needed,
parsnips, purple sprouting broccoli,
rhubarb, spring cabbage, spring cauliflower,
and of course, my personal fav,
Spring Garlic
Garlic, like like love, is generally planted in the fall,
before the frost and harvested the following late summer.
But from March to May,
once the ground has truly thawed,
the young lover plants, spring garlic or green garlic,
can be harvested.
it’s a long bus ride to Western Canada
where the garlic spring has come,
ain’t complaining lots of time to write foolishness
and plant a few good bus poems in northern ontario
and even michigan,
the window slides, and the seeds scattered,
but at every bus poet stop,
those that need it,
planted many inches deep
April 2 naught how I wish I was nineteen again
Apr 12, 2019
Apr 12, 2019 at 4:02 PM UTC
My brother-in-law is the tightly wound sort.
Self contained in his miserable way.
Always quick with a quip or a nasty retort,
and, most likely, a miserable lay.
His job unfulfilling, his woman unwilling.
His co-workers thought he was gay.
He labored long hours for his indifferent masters
for infrequent raises in pay.
When he defenestrated his co worker Sally
and police asked me, what could I say?
" It's always the quiet ones
you have to watch out for-
I knew this would happen someday."
Sep 22, 2013
Sep 22, 2013 at 9:01 PM UTC
the dark approaches as if it is an ineluctable storm
created by thoughts falling like dominoes
or explodes into existence in a breath
detonated by a word innocently spoken
an eclipse constructed of your fears
like locusts eating all the light
with hooks and claws they grasp the air
pulling it up from your lungs
fighting blind against attacks from every side
weapons fall from your trembling grasp
I still see you dimly, enveloped in despair
you no longer see me at all
I have become a phantom, intangible
dispersed into powerless anguish by your terror
my voice is only a murmur to you
a far-off echo, indistinct
defenses and barriers you have labored on
transform into spun glass latticework
shattering through them without knowing
shards left embedded in your skin
stumbling blindly in the darkness
you are swallowed whole into the void
once more you are ripped away
imprisoned in the Stygian, pitiless hole
the emptiness turns its gaze to me
mocking laughter blisters my flesh
I can only wait and call to you
how long till you return
to me
Sep 17, 2018
Sep 17, 2018 at 10:36 PM UTC
Like an alien in a spotlight
With her magnifying glasses on
My mother as she worked, up all night
Did invisible weaving till dawn
I would watch her when I couldn’t sleep
Honing in on that hole in the suit
Intently, her concentration deep
Weaving tiny threads enlarged like jute
In other-worldly light she labored
I was afraid she’d lose her eyesight
Watching her focus never wavered
Her face all aglow in the lamplight
Invisible weaving, I inquired
How tediously she plied her craft
Worked for the money that she required
Made the warp and weft of fabric last
Reconstruction, undetectable
No more burn, or tear, or fabric blight
Weaving magic so incredible
Its wound now perfect by morning’s light
She taught me much that I’m still making
From her life that now I’m grieving
Sewing, crocheting and great baking
But never invisible weaving
The picture of her life that mattered
I now see how she toiled so finely
And that the wrinkles in the fabric
Of my own life splayed out so blindly
The vision of my eyes, bedazzled
Incandescent, her face in the beam
Unaware how her mind unraveled
As Depression stole her ev’ry dream
The threads of DNA defining
Who I’ve become I’m now believing
My mother’s hand in that designing
Of my own Invisible Weaving*
*In honor of my mother, Edla Sylvia Fitzpatrick, on this International Women's Day
Mar 8, 2017
Mar 8, 2017 at 1:01 PM UTC
A hymn to paired planethood: Venus hits Pluto
as death, in cold orbit, collides with biology
smashing to fragments: demonic astrology
(more a black hole than a love-star, it’s true though).
Cynical cure for Eve’s womanly grievance
Concupiscent consequence: lust’s bitter fruit –
ah the thought… changing Sin into mere inconvenience.
Margaret sang her seductive refrain
about weeding the garden and progress and light.
Her sisters should view her with scornful disdain
but instead have adopted her murderous rite.
With sang-froid she promoted her racist eugenics
(as if she had never herself been a fetus),
condemning her heirs to postmodern polemics
while nurturing ardent desires to defeat us.
Suppressing the lives that she flushed down the drain
she would liberate Death – and resistance was vain.
As a midwife to modern life (though on the “anti” side)
Old Matron Margie racked up quite a legacy
singing the praises of sanctioned infanticide
calling the shots for the coming sick century.
Planning, quite calmly, to “cleanse” certain races
her zeal was empowered by murderous graces.
She labored to bring us such pearls of subduction:
“dilation and curettage”, “women’s autonomy”
“viable fetus”, “procedure”, a “suction”
Hippocrates retches to hear the taxonomy;
words that turn Life into mere reproduction.
She enters the realms of the ****** and the motherless
roundly condemned by her feminine otherness.
Man’s first protection: the God-given womb
which no infant should have to regard as their tomb.
Dismembered dark cherubs, assembling, greet her
as demons (in scrubs) holding baby-parts meet her.
Long may she burn with the medical cynics
this mother of Moloch, this founder of clinics.
Convenience is king when abortion’s the Queen
and the profits swell big with each nubile teen…
yet the fruit of such carnage remains to be seen.
I send her this song as a funeral wreath
and a card inked in blood. You may read what is there:
“To the Matrix Supreme of our culture of death
from the souls of the infants you slew on the earth.
May your torment increase with the children you bear.”
Sep 10, 2015
Sep 10, 2015 at 9:09 PM UTC
*Those who quilt
have their secrets..
emerging patterns
laced together..
an initiating flash
then flow of thread
filling the symmetry
with surprise..!
pained reluctance
those corrections..
finally uplifting joy..
Those who quilt
then ask this question:
does the recipient
of this labored gift
resonate with even
one-tenth appreciation..?
is she really
Quilt worthy...?*
Feb 25, 2013
Feb 25, 2013 at 11:24 AM UTC
I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and ***** cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.
Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of Lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull-plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.
A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,
Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.
4.5k
Children, I come back today
To tell you a story of the long dark way
That I had to climb, that I had to know
In order that the race might live and grow.
Look at my face -- dark as the night --
Yet shining like the sun with love's true light.
I am the dark girl who crossed the red sea
Carrying in my body the seed of the free.
I am the woman who worked in the field
Bringing the cotton and the corn to yield.
I am the one who labored as a slave,
Beaten and mistreated for the work that I gave --
Children sold away from me, I'm husband sold, too.
No safety , no love, no respect was I due.
Three hundred years in the deepest South:
But God put a song and a prayer in my mouth .
God put a dream like steel in my soul.
Now, through my children, I'm reaching the goal.
Now, through my children, young and free,
I realized the blessing deed to me.
I couldn't read then. I couldn't write.
I had nothing, back there in the night.
Sometimes, the valley was filled with tears,
But I kept trudging on through the lonely years.
Sometimes, the road was hot with the sun,
But I had to keep on till my work was done:
I had to keep on! No stopping for me --
I was the seed of the coming Free.
I nourished the dream that nothing could smother
Deep in my breast -- the ***** mother.
I had only hope then , but now through you,
Dark ones of today, my dreams must come true:
All you dark children in the world out there,
Remember my sweat, my pain, my despair.
Remember my years, heavy with sorrow --
And make of those years a torch for tomorrow.
Make of my pass a road to the light
Out of the darkness, the ignorance, the night.
Lift high my banner out of the dust.
Stand like free men supporting my trust.
Believe in the right, let none push you back.
Remember the whip and the slaver's track.
Remember how the strong in struggle and strife
Still bar you the way, and deny you life --
But march ever forward, breaking down bars.
Look ever upward at the sun and the stars.
Oh, my dark children, may my dreams and my prayers
Impel you forever up the great stairs --
For I will be with you till no white brother
Dares keep down the children of the ***** Mother.
4.5k
My body is battered,
Riddled with wounds,
Scratched and bruised,
Bloodied and scarred.
My heart is pounding,
My lungs, suffocated,
Yet I continue to breathe,
In soft labored breaths.
My head is held high,
Looking down in defiance,
Refusing to die,
To ever think to give up.
So hit me with your worst,
I'm not the least afraid,
**** me if you must,
You'll never see me cry.
Sep 17, 2014
Sep 17, 2014 at 9:05 PM UTC
My bones have become filled
to the brim with lead
until each step I take
is so labored
I can barely make another.
I am exhausted
to my very core
And I'm expending
every ounce of my energy
simply attempting
to hold my eyelids up.
I can't anymore, I'm sorry.
I just can't, I'm too tired,
I'm going to sleep now,
that deep, restful sleep
from which one doesn't awake.
Jul 26, 2014
Jul 26, 2014 at 5:23 PM UTC
I want to possess you.
I want the quivering of your throne,
The trembling of your bones underneath me.
I want beautiful blood to bleed for me.
Reach for me from your place _beneath_ me.
Between my fingers
I want to feel the struggling breaths of your heart,
Pinched veins in your throat,
And your whimper like a sweet ****
In the dark...the dark.
The dark in my selfish eyes match the night.
The coo in my voice tells you it's fine...
Bruises ruin ruined skin,
I make you mine.
Thin nails along your jaw,
Devil's claw.
Say it now, say it raw:
You are mine.
Never let another come near,
Nor touch you, taste you.
Raging jealousy, I fear.
You are my pet who speaks when I say, my dear.
On the scent of musk, a predator's lust;
I must admit unsettling crime:
I'm tired of watching...
I'll make you mine.
Now beg for me.
Rope 'round your wrists,
Under my control.
You are darling like this.
Teeth leave starved greedy marks,
Labored torn lips and fingertips
Where the sweat pools in the dark...
The dark.
Apr 20, 2018
Apr 20, 2018 at 8:15 PM UTC
O black toad,
Sage of the sodden floor,
Grant me your stoicism
As I go my labored way.
And may you prosper,
Consume legions, grow fat;
Yet deftly elude all
Who would do you injury.
Jul 1, 2019
Jul 1, 2019 at 7:23 PM UTC
Young Liam loved Orange
and liked to wear ties.
To his firehouse friends
He was one of the guys.
He had his own locker
a slicker and hat.
He also had cancer,
and a bad one at that.
From early on in his life
he fought neuroblastoma ;
An invasive tumor
a metastatic carcinoma.
His family who loved him
labored to save
their dear little child
Prince Liam the Brave.
He faced surgery bravely,
engaged in his fight..
He endured radiation
Chemo and knife.
When many a New Yorker
complains about stress,
Prince Liam was stoic
When put to the test.
Then just before Christmas
he suffered a relapse
He became neutrapenic-
His immune system collapsed.
With blood in his *****
And a spot on his lung
Liam grew weak.
his defenses undone.
An Amethyst stone
he received from a friend
was his talisman of hope
that he held to the end.
The worst part of the journey
was when hope was gone.
Then Liam lay, still and silent
in his mother's arms.
There are brave fire fighters
Who’ll be fighting back tears
Brave Prince Liam has died,
He lived only six years
There are many old people
still avoiding the grave
Who know less about love
Than did Liam the brave
We will gather together
In St Francis’ nave
To remember the life of
Prince Liam the brave
i
Dec 29, 2011
Dec 29, 2011 at 8:18 AM UTC
My mother is dying.
It is a process. Days pass,
She neither eats or drinks,
Yet she lives on.
I watch each labored exhalation,
A subtraction, a countdown.
It is as if she was returning each singular day,
Every prayer uttered, answered and unanswered,
Every word e're spoke, every dream dreamt,
She ever possessed to the atmosphere,
For sharing, for recalling, for retelling,
One breath at a time.
~~~~~~~~~
Lipstadt-Roth, Miriam née Peiman, 1915~2013,
passed peacefully Sat. July 20th.
Critic, speaker, writer,
her fiercest feat,
her leading role, creator.
A near century of memories
her legacy, memories that
linger not, for incised,
chiseled in the granite of the
books, papers, and poetry
and the very being
of her descendants.
Her faith in Almighty,
unflagging, for he did not
forsake her in the time of
her old age, when
her strength failed.
Jul 20, 2013
Jul 20, 2013 at 12:53 PM UTC
Glory to craftsmanship
That endures the wrath of time
Artisans vanish one by one
As is Nature's custom
But their inner beauty
Remains in their labored art.
A masterful stroke of hand
Guided by divine volition
Engages thought's flight
To spheres unknown
Where true art gives birth
To creativity's genius.
Art imparts mystical light
Upon envisioned designs
Shaped by hand, heart and spirit
A poem, a painting, a silver cup
Is brought to life
For the pure joy of creation.
O' masters of the wind
Hearken the hopes of craftsmen
And steer their zing heavenward
They are the symbol of plastic arts
A manifestation of wizardry
Toiling in labyrinth of formation.
Jun 7, 2018
Jun 7, 2018 at 10:59 AM UTC
Tired of living in a false paradise of consumption,
suffering everyday our labored prostitution,
trade in your hours for a handful of scraps,
smile while your master puts the cigar out on your back,
this is the workers symphony,
aching joints, aching psyche,
smothered in whiskey to **** the pain,
our autonomous freedom we'll never regain,
slave till you die, laugh till it hurts, your meaning in life, to merely survive,
collect your checks week after week, creative minds stomped out, just smile and drink,
be a good slave except your fate,
it's just the way it is boy get back in your place,
we gravel in dispair, they spit in our face,
we waste our lives away,
on our hands and knees but we just smile and drink,
thinking about breaking these chains,
it's punishable by law,
authority laughs when you die slow for your keep,
with your eyes wide shut,
don't wake your slumber,
it's all a bad dream,
just go back to sleep,
and forget life's blunder
Jun 8, 2018
Jun 8, 2018 at 5:03 PM UTC
Which Is Greater?
I break a vow.
A serious vow.
In a place, in this site,
Where the fluid pain
Is the water of the world,
The element that is crux,
The amniotic liquor of creative flux,
The morning juice,
The afternoon caffe,
The first beer of the day,
The liquid that we rinse and spit out our every day,
I will write about pain,
Arrogantly, as if there is any unused combination of
Letters, vowels and consonants left unspoken, *****
Having sworn not to, for pain is cumulative.
Asking myself,
Which is greater?
The pain of creation, inception, origination and birth,
The pain of wreck and ruin, destruction and death.
Homework Self-Assignment: Compare and Contrast
Suddenly, I am expert.
Creating a poem a day is very painful.
A poem that is the sum of
Reflection, research, and purging.
Once I wrote:
*The poem is the afterbirth,
A conflicts resolution, an outcome,
Battlefield debris, the residue of
An exacting vision, a sentiment surging,
And your army of words, inadequate to the task,
Fighting to capture that insight flashed,
Each word a soldier, disheveled,
Crying, let me live, let me be saved,
Let me make a poem,
Let it be inscribed upon my victorious flag.
The poem is the sweat left upon the brow,
Having exercised the five senses,
The salt of struggle and debate,
It's completion, each word,
Both a victory and a defeat.*
Suddenly, I am expert.
My mother is dying.
It is a process. Days pass,
She neither eats or drinks,
Yet she lives on.
I watch each labored exhalation,
A subtraction, a countdown,
It is as if she was returning each singular day,
Every word e're spoke, every dream dreamt,
she ever possessed to the atmosphere,
One breath at a time.
Is that painful?
It is for me.
Now you complain. They're different, not to be compared, et cetera.
Pain is pain,
Whether it is in the service of creation, or
Creative destruction.
Once I wrote:
*With each passing poem,
I am lessened within, expurgated,
In a sense part of me, expunged,
Part of me, passing too,
Every poem's birth diminishes me.*
So, one and the same?
Nope. Yes. But. Cannot one be the greater?
Yes, one is greater.
When I lay on my deathbed,
I will exhale the answer
Into the atmosphere
For your retrieval.
Jul 19, 2013
Jul 19, 2013 at 7:06 PM UTC
Nine months after I was born, the Twentieth Century began to collapse.
East Berlin,graffiti-mural concrete, a jutted enigma scratched
on ordinance maps, the sort found
landscaping westernized Primary School walls.
Where within, labored in real time, the television told my parents
(and everyone else given to social conservation in 1989) that a wall falling down
would bring an end to the gap between the working and the working poor.
Freedom waited for many on the other side.
But of course, History draws up different plans.
Never content to just go out with a bash, or to
fleetingly drift by leaving
in its absence an underwhelmed lull
The bloodiest century yet
left the new world entrenched
in an odyssey of hatreds
handed down from the past
right about the time human suffering became a bit dull
and the peaceful countries were too busy
tripling their money instead.
What does History really teach us and what are the real benefits
of being free, or freer than you were before?
Human ambition, which burns it way out of any oasis of calm,
which calls children out of sleeping in the night
Always seeks out the exhaustible
An inveterate Black sheep leading astray
the ever susceptible ****** lamb
Delusion’s strange bedfellows are the worthiest adversaries
to run away from, to reserve contrition for.
Unlike the inevitability of uprooted animal migration
during a monsoon swell
Can a people with an invested addiction
to the pursuit of happiness
Ever truly be prepared
for the inevitability of rapid change?
Jun 16, 2013
Jun 16, 2013 at 6:00 PM UTC
My neighbor labored to build a fence
All walls of stone and wooden planks
To separate the world from them
Building row after row
In haste as if their life depended on
Finding where other do or do not belong
Tall and sturdy slightly dirtied
The fence stood
To me t’was no good
It blocked the trees, it stop the leaves,
And blooming branches
In their veiled vanity
They blocked their view of humanity
So with words a blazing
With verses of poetry
That had built up inside of me
I sang songs of wisdom
To teach them
To tear down the fences
And see all the beauty
Jul 19, 2015
Jul 19, 2015 at 5:10 PM UTC
[part 1 - The Depending of Rescue]
I've waited so long for you
to take me to the place where light came through
all this time I thought you would save me
But together we were stuck in this dark sea
Myself so lost in this tearing tide
only to find, I was not alone inside
fighting the waves to get free
growing powers grew deep down in me
[part 2 - Becoming Atlas]
Im out into the sky beyond the stars
looking down at the land so far
lost souls still trapped behind
I came back for you, I have to find
Spend my life searching and saving
to stop my heart from this painful raging
help those stand on the land I have found
your still lost in the black, quiet is the sound
I see your eyes, so bright as the brightest night star
Drifting away from my hand, floating so far
Ive spent my life so long to bring you to shore
I cannot stop its what I'm existing for
[part 3 - The Distraction]
In search for you I have saved so much
millions have felt my graceful touch
they plead for me to guide them away
So many I lead to see a new day
Shining light over their homes
making them feel the warmth in their souls
Starting a future that they can live in
But with all my power, I cannot find where you've been
bound by duties you slip away from me
away from view, and deeper into the sea
The older I grow the more of you I miss
but all these feelings I am forced to dismiss
[Part 4 - Atlas Relinquished]
Strength has raged within in my blood
my veins are dried while my emotions flood
away from my heart into the night
tired by the constant shine of light
Broken labored hands are laid to rest
after long years of might's test
exasperation falls over my will
want nothing more to forever be still
I can no longer help to build
I lay slowly upon the field
body and soul unable to lift
watching the world, still, it sits
Feb 18, 2013
Feb 18, 2013 at 1:22 AM UTC
Snap, crack, snap -- twigs break underneath
Each burst is music fed deep into her heart
Balmy air blows crisp across her cheek
A kiss as sweet as a daughter's caress
Pride inhaled with each labored breath
Seventeen miles of inclines and slopes
Over fallen trees and swollen creeks
Intentional steps, stitches of success sewn into
the blanket of her soul as she
wanders along the path of her
journey to renewal
Nov 1, 2013
Nov 1, 2013 at 8:54 AM UTC
Like an alien in a spotlight
With her magnifying glasses on
My mother as she worked, up all night
Did invisible weaving till dawn
I would watch her when I couldn’t sleep
Honing in on that hole in the suit
Intently, her concentration deep
Weaving tiny threads enlarged like jute
In other-worldly light she labored
I was afraid she’d lose her eyesight
Watching her focus never wavered
Her face all aglow in the lamplight
Invisible weaving, I inquired
How tediously she plied her craft
Worked for the money that she required
Made the warp and weft of fabric last
Reconstruction, undetectable
No more burn, or tear, or fabric blight
Weaving magic so incredible
Its wound now perfect by morning’s light
She taught me much that I'm still making
From her life that now I'm grieving
Sewing, crocheting and great baking
But never invisible weaving
The picture of her life that mattered
I now see how she toiled so finely
And that the wrinkles in the fabric
Of my own life splayed out so blindly
The vision of my eyes bedazzled
Incandescent, her face in the beam
Unaware how her mind unraveled
As depression stole her ev'ry dream
The threads of DNA defining
Who I’ve become I'm now believing
My mother’s hand in that designing
Of my own Invisible Weaving
Feb 25, 2016
Feb 25, 2016 at 12:24 PM UTC
There is a history, could be called their story,
But the clouds,
To the dirt beneath,
Their finger nails,
All were lined in silver,
Or other precious metals,
Smelted with treasured memories,
Weaving silver through all,
The storms, along every cloud,
Each raindrop and teardrop too,
They labored,
In veins of mineral mines,
They smelted iron ore,
Got more troy ounces then they
Bargained for, by the millions,
Gold and silver for those linings,
Precious and semi-precious metals,
From deep holes in the ground,
To a furnace that evaporated sweat,
Under the fireproof suits, they worked hard,
Honestly while wearing protective lenses and
Not rose coloured glasses, it was a good life,
Memories and faded glory days,
Until the Company, took it away, bit by bit,
Leaving,
Flame but little glory,
To those special days,
And bygone days,
There are still a few,
Who survived modernization,
There are many more,
Whose best memory,
Is the pension,
Crew mates are gone,
Spouses are gone,
Yet the special days,
Are celebrated anyways,
In the Silver City,
That joy is almost,
Tangible, to when,
Generations of men,
Went home to their women, children
Broke bread, drink vino and shots of grappa,
Sharing day shift or afternoons,
And graveyard shifts during the boom,
Today many years later, more than 100,
Now the fireworks light the night-sky,
While figments of the past, stand shoulder,
To shoulder, with those who remain,
Shared memories of silver linings.
May 12, 2013
May 12, 2013 at 1:05 AM UTC