This is My Mom and Dad

On 2020110120201101 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems12 Comments

This is my mom and dad
About ten years before my birth;
Where it was taken I do not know
I think somewhere on earth

But there’s a story in how they’re looking
Each at one another;
And somewhere within that look there came
A father and a mother

To three little children, a girl and two boys
As different as dawn, night and noon:
They, of course, did not know all this back then
But they would find out soon

They traveled the world with their children in tow
As each one came along;
From high mountain peaks and the valleys below
With sorrow and with song

Just one other family, I guess, to those
Whose god is “society”:
Obscure and unknown to a fame-obsessed world
But everything
To me

Hemisfair ’68

On 2019080120190801 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems10 Comments

[This is my mom and a very small me in 1968. – Owen]

The 1968 “Hemisfair”
And that whole trip was great:
My mother looked so young, back then
Just short of thirty- eight

My brother and sister and dad were there
There was so much to see:
Like I met H. R. Pufnstuf
A year before T.V.

There riding on the train that day
In childhood ecstasy:
The whole world in a state of play
My family
And me

The Tiny House

On 2019033020190329 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems3 Comments

The tiny house my grandma lived in

I can still recall —

Of course, with photographs

It helps the case

But I recall the smell

Just like the powder that she used

That gathered in the cracks

Upon her face

The olden books than lined the shelves

And all those grandma pillows

That didn’t seem that practical

To me

But how I loved the place

The clothes on clotheslines in the back

That still blow on

In loving

Memory

My Sister

On 2019032620190326 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems1 Comment

This is my sister, about

To leave home,

And have a happy 1972

Photographs are strange,

Making the old young again

And time reverse —

I remember well that car

That very day

And that lost leaf driveway

My older sister

Radiant with her new hope

Like summer itself

How Did I Miss Seeing It?

On 2017073120180616 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems1 Comment

Here I am again, then – very young
And wandering the beaches of my youth;
My father, with his Kodak, took this picture
And I thought nothing of it then, in truth

The wonder of a sea so vast and teeming;
Of sand so white, with so much sky above —
Does not today seem to me as astounding
As how it was I missed
My father’s love