The Good Lord Searches the Good Book

And the good Lord in all His many and varied forms

opened the Good Book, thumbing through the pages,

dogged-eared and torn, taped together in places

and yellowed, to get His words right, exactly

as He had said them, heard them quoted even, in verses

memorized by the children, simply believing, yet greedy enough

to work for the prize of memorized verses, a pin or ribbon

to wear on their Sunday best, or maybe a new Book

by summer’s end, too new perhaps to be soiled in reading it,

but He continued to thumb through His own copy, old and worn thin,

much used, looking for that same verse He too had memorized once,

and still remembered it, but is it possible He’d misquoted it,

for it sounded so foreign now, all these years, eons, since Paul had

written it down; perhaps, too, He was getting old, a touch of dementia,

something lost in the translation, or just getting forgetful, so busy,

His creation so needy, making their lives so hard, so complicated,

putting demands on Him, adding their own spin to His words

in a world evolving, despite them and their interference; all He asked

was written there in the Good Book, even those new-fangled translations,

easier to read and understand, and misinterpret, when what He said was, “Oh, here,

here it is, right under this fold of a page,” “faith, hope, but the greatest of these is love.” 

The Nightly Walks

We walk the local roads, dirt roads,

dusty and rock strewn, 4-wheel drive roads,

the dogs and I, roads going nowhere

and everywhere, dead-end roads leading us

deeper into our own thoughts, into ourselves,

my eyes scanning all directions, into the woods

on one side, noting spring’s new colors, and the passage

of seasons, new trails to follow, opening up, and the lake

on the other, my neighbors boating, a friendly wave, an eagle

searching, hearing a bird’s songs, his calling, the cry  

of the loons, and the rustling of something unseen in the forest,

the huff of deer in warning, or a bull frog disturbed in our passing,

the smell of earth and earth’s decay sharp in my nose, the sun

hot or the winds cooling as we plod along, going nowhere.

And for them, leashed and tugging me to follow, their noses

to the ground, every smell is rich, telling, sniffing whatever it is

they decern, a rotted log turned up, a patch of mud, the scat

of wilderness, a footprint, not mine nor their, not human,

perhaps some distraction, a far-off smell or a faint sound

I cannot hear, perking up their ears, alerting their senses,

a sense of danger present, a sense of some unknown

leading them along, this their world just beyond their noses,

a world perhaps forgotten in the next rock or bush or blade

of grass scented, their own shortened world changing around them.

But it’s how we go, these roads, a couple of miles into ourselves,

going nowhere, and discovering, perhaps, a whole new place

where we are kings, rulers of this domain we find on our nightly

walks, a couple of miles on the local roads, dirt roads going nowhere,

going everywhere, leading us into our own thoughts, into ourselves.

A Warm Spring Day

A warm spring day

on the edge of summer,

the daffodils rise up 

imbued by the morning sun.

Libertas

********************

How far would you travel to find a better life? What if the journey

took weeks under difficult conditions? If you answered, “whatever it takes,”

you echo the feelings of 12 million immigrants who passed through the now quiet halls of Ellis Island … [which] afforded them the opportunity to attain the American Dream

for themselves and their descendants.

National Parks Service, Ellis Island

******************** 

She stands alone in a New York harbor, her torch

held high and freedom’s tablet still carried on her hip;

she is now, perhaps, just a tourist attraction, a tourist trap

of glitz and glitter, for the luxury liners of old with their

lower class holds of immigrants have stopped, and Ellis

Island has shut down, a museum, a mausoleum of old stories

and history, the forgotten people but pictures on the walls.

No longer is she an Enlightenment to the World, the tired,

the poor, the huddled masses yearning, none are welcomed now,

cut off from the American Dream they longed for, all just aliens,

illegals, thieves and terrorists, rapists and drug dealers invading,

the unwelcomed, the wretched refuse of teeming shores, jailed,

deported back to the wretched conditions they escaped in leaving,

poverty and sickness, fear and danger, death, Liberty’s lamp

extinguished to them, a lamp darkened by those who have forgotten

their own immigrant roots seeking their own American Dreams, these

immigrant progeny, generations afraid of losing their own ambitions,

their goals disrupted, perhaps, by the dross of a fading Colossus,

an icon of freedom and a symbol of welcome, alone now in a New York

harbor, a lost reminder of our once hailed greatness, still calling out

to deaf ears, this mother of exiles, “send these, your homeless,

tempest-tossed, to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”