Orion's Season

Constellated against the dark night,
Orion steps quietly onto the winter sky
and boldly strides through the ice and snow
of his season, blinded and “hungry for the morn”;
it’s a journey we take together, he and I,
forward towards a new light, a new age.

History Lessons

Growing up white

the Negro was someone

my father knew of, and disapproved,

seldom spoke about, and the Japanese

were an old enemy he couldn’t forgive,

wouldn’t talk about, saddened still

by the burials at sea.

And history presented itself

to me without them, the Negro, the Japanese,

others I knew so little about,

yet I’ve found them now no different from me,

bipedal and seeking love, seeking peace,

no different except in color and race

and a history I never learned at school,

interconnected histories that shaped

and morphed us and our perceptions,

so hard to change, years hence,

when change we must, and understanding.

In this world today where it matters,

their history and mine and ours and the world

we have become, we must overcome ourselves –

remembering –

to begin a new history, one history

shared, leading us toward one humanity,

one people finding love, finding ourselves
and an end to the things that separate us.

The Night Before Christmas, 2016

At the lake, Christmas and snow complete the season,

but what if, as I suspect, this year the lake doesn’t freeze,

nor any snow fall to the ground, nothing there to insulate us

from the arctic wind that blows across the water,

an element we bundle warm against this season of cold,

our collars pulled up tight around our ears.

And the child in me, bundled so, wonders about Santa’s sleigh,

how this lack of snow and ice impedes his arrival.

Surely, the runners will tear at the shingles of my roof,

the damage, too, of restless reindeer hooves;

these thoughts will keep me awake as Santa makes his rounds,

and I fear again that same old threat my parents employed

to make me sleep on Christmas Eve:

“Santa won’t come if you aren’t sleeping.”

I can imagine, now, his sleigh thudding down onto my roof,

the scrape of steel pulled over asphalt,

the trampling of tiny hooves; and with no snow

to muffle the landing, this sleigh full of toys

and the prancing and pawing of each little hoof

will undoubtedly wake the dog, set off her alarm

to keep us safe and scare Santa away,

lifting off to the Christmas sky without a descent

down my chimney and magically appearing

in my living room, this right jolly old elf,

twinkling eyes and nose like a cherry.

Oddly, though, this intruder has never woken her in past years,

no interloper alerting her to stir me from my sugarplum dreams;

I’ve just accepted no warning bark, no alarm sounding,

just as I accepted the evidence of Santa’s visit

under the tree the next morning, awestruck, ribbons and bows

and presents, the stockings full, as it’s always been

after a Christmas Eve’s restful sleep, believing and unafraid.

Despite that, this year, perhaps, my fears will be realized,

no boxes and bows and ribbons, only empty stockings

left hanging on a cold fireplace. No Christmas

this year, if there is no snow, only that arctic wind blowing,

bundling up to shut it out. A Christmas without snow,

no insulation to shelter me from the adult that I have become,

believing still - wanting to - yet worried about the roof,

the shingles, a dog that doesn’t bark when the security

of my home is breached by a stranger in red

suddenly appearing down my chimney, and she

setting off no alarm, no warning; that dread alone

will keep me awake this year without snow,

a Christmas morning spent around an empty tree,

that age old threat come true:

“Santa won’t come if you aren’t sleeping.”

Early Winter Ice

Early winter ice, delicate and fragile,

skimmed the lake last night,

a thin layer that gives way at my touch,

touching it just to feel the quiet stillness

of early winter ice, delicate and fragile.

Finding America

- with much thanks to the History Channel -

My immigrant ancestry goes back

to Banbury’s cross, ornate

and celebrated in rhyme, a pilgrimage, too,

and torn down by the faithful,

the righteous, the Pure, protesting,

purifying their lives and God

to fit themselves, Bible-based,

a strict and uncompromising people

becoming bullies, intolerant in the new world

to which they came, this Promised Land

of rightful worship, religious freedom,

England’s colony, left to destroy themselves.

And die out they did, leaving behind them

who we have become, their legacy

in this much different world and time,

modern America, self-reliant and, politically,

bent to localism, Americanism at its finest,

carrying us into the 20^th century,

the new millennium, the Promised Land

of modern man, rapid change, progress,

global war and science, travel

in a shrinking world that melds us

into one people even as we fight against it,

against the loss of self in an all-inclusive community,

shared power and the commerce thereof,

one lost among the many more, changing fast.

Yet fear accompanies that loss,

accompanies that change and the ease of life created,

a change too troublesome, leaving us behind, and afraid.

But our roots grow deep, back to Banbury’s cross

and the faithful, the righteous, the Pure

who left, our immigrant roots defining us

who opposed England’s church and rule and fleeing,

finding “in the free air of the New World”

themselves and us and a way of life,

self-reliance and self-rule, finding America,

scrutinizing ourselves by the stirrings

of our grace acknowledged and our divinely sanctioned

energies of a soul put to use, benevolent

and violently destructive, to return

to who we were and what we’ve become now

in a modern world that threatens us,

threatens our identities as a free people.