A Willful Seamstress

A Willful Seamstress

She’d watched enough Netflix, tried writing her lifestyle book
But her mirror kept reflecting her inconsequential looks

So …

Several bandana sized swatches folded over centered coffee filters
They then folded over three times crisp and ironed into pleats

With one large ponytailer set into each folded end
They serving as ear loops sewn into their reinforced hems

That’s what happened when she decided to make a difference
Dozens now, washable, wearable, wash and wear again

No she won’t stand next to med techs as they stand each to their tasks
It’s just they can’t save lives without her clean new homemade masks

Tater Lent

Tater Lent

They’ve grown stubby white fingers
  These leftover spuds that linger
In a wood box in a corner
  Of the basement where it’s cool

Some call them eyes, yet as any-
  One can plainly see they’re blind
Left under this tarp in the dark
  But for the Yankee Cook to find

Time of the year there’s a logic to Lent,
  Most taters from this box were spent
Peeled nightly for a dinner side dish
  Or diced in soup, now I relent

Here’s just enough left for seed stock
  Which if eaten now leaves none for planting
Which reason’s now they’re only borrowed
  And to the earth some must return

That means Lent

… and anyway they’re gone a bit
  wrinkly dried and moldy

Wearing Our Corona Crowns

Wearing Our Corona Crowns

What is this fear?
What is it?

Don’t do that
Don’t touch your eye
Don’t wipe your nose

Don’t go there
Make a little list
  Get what you need, get out
Scurry like mice before the
  Invisible cat as catch can

I will obey all stated guidelines
Please would you do so too?

Masks, wear ‘em if you got ‘em
  The Have-Nots bare their naked chins
While the rest of us look like bandits
  Behind our pretty silk hand-dannas
All Thieves come out to steal
  Friendship

One sneezed and everybody flees

Spring yard children
  Playing in the grass
Moms with carriages
  Barefaced and bold
Girls sit their smiles squinting
  To the Sun
Boys stand watching the girls
  Yet no one goes over there

Some have died
Remember Minnie

Let us not friend fear to live

Daylight Savings

Daylight Savings

Do plants understand Daylight Savings time?
How much daylight have we put in the bank today?

In a sunny window my pet plants swell new shoots
  Set next to last month’s Valentine tulips
They having spent 2 months in the bottom fridge crisper drawer
  So to prompt dark dormancy

They’re naturally from the South

Seems coldier than yesterday
Sun three o’clock settier than yesterday
  Cold nose runnier than yesterday

Clean shoots reaching for outside
  Oh no, not yet little swells

Warm March lights belie frost nights

New Year’s News

New Year’s News

New Years day wakens to a mourning
  of the two newses;

First comes the Baby first born of the New Year,
  born in our city at one or another Hospital,
It’s not the birth of baby new year
  top hat cane and white scarf attired, 
Just a necessitous loaf of pink baby dough
  needy to brood in life’s heat lamp, and tired

Next after the commercial is our first murder,
  who’s a name I did not know, in a place I would not go,
And a knife or a gun on a street somewhere
  so cold and dark alone,
No it’s not the murder of the inoocents,
  just it’s usually an innocent been murderded

Passively every year over coffee it begins again,
  the annual blinkering of horrors that walk our quotidian ways,
The getting up on cold mornings,
  the coming home of dark nights,
Dumb in numb ears the news of the world,
  which I concede I do dismiss -
I wanna care about that -
  I’m tired, tomorrow, I’ll care about that

Until it’s no longer New Year’s,
  yawn four o’clock yawn news New Years day,
And I’m praying, yes praying, think praying,
  cocooned in my own nappy life,
Thoughts and prayers and that pink bread dough baby –
  wrap her up, love her warm,,
Safe from this January world, dark and knives and cold,
  she’ll grow up, she’ll save the world
 
  Please, maybe …

A Wistful Villanelle

A Wistful Villanelle

I don’t remember what it was that wish
Standing below the stairs at Grand Central
Still I can see that star like yesterday

The sky is green in Grand Central Station
Green as the green room where life awaited
I don’t remember what it was that wish

Home from college on vacation that week
Come in to NYC to see a show
Still I can see that star like yesterday

Going to stand in line at the TKTS booth
Imagined it was I upon that stage
I don’t remember what it was that wish

Standing below the stairs at Grand Central
My eyes rose selecting that one star light
Still I can see that star like yesterday

I laid a young man’s wish upon that star
I have to think I doubt that it came true
I don’t remember what it was that wish
Still I can see that star like yesterday

The Poem about a Chair

The Poem about a Chair


Walking home from the thrift shop
I balanced a chair on my head
With one arm, holding, like an African woman

Walking by the the school playground
A young girl yelled out;
“Hey, you look like an idiot!”

Walking in when I got home I
Put the chair on the floor and sat down

Now who’s an idiot ?!