Faith is the bird that feels the light,
and sings when the dawn is still dark.
--Rabindranath Tagore
Photo by Liane Enkelis Photo by Leslie Mixon
How can a person keep from singing?
Is that a shakuhachi the hippie is playing?
What was that about Prose for the Great Turning?
So what about a joke?
Well, do you know why they invented the wheelbarrow?
To teach the Irishman to walk on his hind legs.
And poems?
If words come forth,
what comes third?
or, FDR Haiku:
Sixty-two years old,
got Social Security.
Safe to start singing.
This next one is a little longer. Notice it contains a quasi-rhyme for the supposedly unrhymable word "orange," plus the phrase some poet called the most sonorous in the language, "cellar door."
Nuclear Summer
It was bright shining cold and blowing Decembrrr
in the San Joaquin Valley yesterday, icy north wind blasting,
breaking branches off Farmer Lou's eucalyptus trees
and dropping them in our road.
Despite the cold, and a little cold,
I fixed old Charlie Ramirez' cellar door,
on the south side of his house, out of the wind,
just below the kitchen window where he sat in the sun.
Asked Charlie did he know about nuclear winter,
how hydrogen bombs and sun star fire are the same,
he said, "oh, sure."
In the evening my cold got worse.
Drank brandy, ate an orange, spirits of summer in storage,
and read about surviving Auschwitz.
Waking in the dark, my cold was worse.
On the shortwave among waves of solar static
I listened to Beethoven, Radio Moscow news
and winter storm warnings in the North Atlantic:
winds to 45 knots, waves to 25 feet.
Got up, turned off the heat,
and curled up again under cotton, goose down and wool.
This morning, my cold is worse.
I twist a knob and the gassy essence
of ancient dinosaur jungles heats my house.
I twist another and make herb tea with summer flower honey.
Turn rocking chair to the southeast window,
I sit and close my eyes,
breathing in bright morning sun.
Praise God for thermonuclear fusion,
so far away,
safe and warm.