Ghost Kitten Ramble

Ghost Kitten Ramble

When it is dark he’s colored dark

And when its light he’s lite fur white

He can blend into the sunshine

He hides under blankets of night

With little care for home and lodge

With one eye open sleeps awake 

Attendant on the midnight watch

The other closed asleep he wakes 

He gnaws the hand that feeds him treats

Then licks his five toed barb clawed feet

He’ll never let me pick him up

My ghost kitten, to hold and keep

Not Your Mom’s Day Lillies

Not Your Mom’s Day Lillies

Old Pound Ridge, the kind of town
Mom could just pull over and dig
  A bucket full of wild day lillies
They then waving bye their leaves
  Riding in the summer breeze of our tied open car trunk
And nobody cared
  How’d you think they first got there?

Special, these were those orange ones that
Mom said grew native in the rural Northeast
  Before then only tended to by Adam’s garden bees
And no one ever planted those Asiatic breeds
  Packed and shipped from foreign shores
With spikey fingernail long leaves
  Powder faced like Mandarin Chinese

Wistful, I’ve longed for those lillies by our mailbox
Here in my new home a half-life away,
  Four decades since Mom passed away
And I’m spending this sunny day
  Sorting through packages in a garden store
But these aren’t them from my way back when
  Those times I can’t return again

It’s only a three hour car trip
And then a three hour run back
  But I wonder would our old neighbors today
Call the police seeing me dig up theirs?
  And think too of the tearing buds and leaves
In highway winds at turnpike speeds
  My heart sinks to think of driving back there

To that place by our house on the roadside
Next to where our old breadbox sized
  Yellow painted mailbox stood,
No numbers or ‘RR” laundry markered on
  Just our family name
Where Mom planted those same wild lillies
  I saw her dig up in that bucket

That then rooted and divided in
A crowded plot on the downhill slope
  Below the stonewall to the road
That passed on by those too few years
  Before age rerooted me far from a barefoot childhood

No, they’re not Mom’s day lillies
  But memories with love I plant
    Far from their lot in my transplanted city

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 …