Prom Approaches

Prom approaches, though still weeks away,

and the girls huddle over computers

and tablets searching dress sites

for styles and costs, purchases, or worse, copies

to be made like the high priced ones they can’t afford,

hoping no one notices the crooked seams stitched

by their mothers days before, embarrassed, ashamed,

the tears shed over a parent’s refusal

to spend “that much” for a single night,

perhaps a mother who forgot the importance of a prom dress,

the status of style and store and a price tag,

or a father who never knew, never cared, his own mother

ordering a tux and flowers and his father

handing over the keys to the family car, freshly

washed and filled with gas to impress his date

and her parents who watch guardedly through the flash

of cameras creating memories to stick in a box,

forgotten in the years ahead and remembered only briefly

in a spring when our daughters huddle over dress sites

and our sons, tongue-tied, stammer to ask for the car,

remembering that one night, crepe-paper streamers

and the dates we left behind after the dance had ended.

The Pink Car is in My Head

--- For Hilary ---

The pink car is in my head,

parked there next to Barbie’s house,

the one I assembled Christmas Eve of 85

because she wanted it, had to have it, Barbie did,

that house, sparsely furnished, and a car,

“Barbie needs a car,” a pink car.

The car sits empty now, there in my head,

and the house, too, empty, Barbie’s house and mine;

she moved away and bought her own car –

a red one – and her own house with Ken and Skipper,

and the pink car, parked in my head,

is all I have left.

Needle and Thread

A needle, slender and sharp,

draws a dark thread in and out,

stitching together cloth woven

of dreams, generations of dreams

back through time to our beginnings,

Banbury’s tailor stitching together

broadcloth into shirts and breeches,

sold on order or bartered away as payment;

so, too, are we all woven together

through Stephen and Daniel and John,

woven and stitched and bound together

with a common thread, a long, dark thread

drawing us closer, tighter, conjoined

in one spirit, one soul through time

traveling forward, settling now in us

who pass it on to you, my sons and daughters,

an endless thread of dreams continuing.

The Age of Aquarius

It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius

when we lay ourselves across the steps

of the Capital buildings and sat

chained together by the ideals we held close,

a world without war and violence, but peace,

one humanity, harmony and understanding,

sympathy and trust abounding, even as we asked

the questions, how many roads must a man walk down?

Our hair and our clothes and our music set us apart

from them, them against us, tuning out, this establishment

bent on violence and death and beating us back, beating

us down; and perhaps they did as we traded in our bell

bottoms and tie-dyed shirts and peace sign pins

for the uniforms of adulthood and took our places

in the workforce and family life, this new order,

lying dormant, though, even as we waited.

And the war ended and the broken people came home,

re-assimilated – or not – watching, though, for the sun

to rise and with it another day, another age,

another Aquarius dawning.

Now we ask a question that can’t be answered,

nor does it matter really, are we seeing the end

of Pisces’ values and a new dawning come to fruition?

Dormant no more, broken people remember,

and we rise with this new dawn, chained still together

by the ideals of peace, harmony and understanding,

locked arm in arm, new chains binding us, strengthened,

together lying again on the steps of the Capital buildings,

as we did before, millions together rising up,

hell, no, we won’t go, won’t go away this time,

beat down no longer, nor beat back;

we can never forget, nor will we: No more

falsehoods or derision, golden living dreams

of visions, mystic crystal revelation

and the mind’s true liberation.

Equality, respect, an uplifting of spirit

and a unity of humaneness, a new consciousness

of rightness rising, a global cause in a world

gone mad begun again as it does each age,

each generation, growing stronger and stronger,

the dawning of the age of Aquarius rising anew,

waking, waking us, millions, millions united

for the cause of humanity: Peace will guide the planets,

and love will stir the stars, the moon in the seventh

house and Jupiter aligned with Mars.