The Echoes of a Single Day

On 2019123020191230 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems10 Comments

Once, you were trapped;
But this did not endure.
Through windswept hours,
Time could not inure
You to the hopelessness
That seemed to be:
For you were someone else,
A mystery,
And that one day
Was an
Eternity —

The beach felt lonesome,
Waiting for a chance,
And sadness whirled around you,
Like a dance;
A day to find, and sore
Your vigil keep,
In waking hours
Little more than sleep —
The waves would crest and fall,
The ocean
Steep —

I watched you, I could
Feel your wand’ring heart;
Some hours there together,
Lives apart,
I kissed you on the cheek
Beside your car
To let you know
I don’t know who you are,
But you’ve a destination
Somewhere far,

And that I wished you well
As there you’d go;
For you’d a life to live

Not mine

To know

Remembering My First Real… Love

On 2019122820191228 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems2 Comments

When I last wrote about her
It was at my first real dance;
But soon, she was my first real love,
My very first romance –

And all that lovers always feel
We also underwent —
The crystal pure elation
That we could not help but vent –

And it was like real happiness
Was something new to me;
When she was anywhere nearby
I was in ecstasy –

But, strange in thinking back, how much
Of heartache we went through;
Of all the infidelity,
The cheating we’d each do –

Our love was real, though. Very real.
Although we grew estranged;
The love between us still remained —
It is that “us”
That changed

Kitchen Breakaway

On 2019122420191223 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems3 Comments

That morning, we awoke,
And I remember: runners on the beach,
And there was music, somewhere,
Through the open window,
As we munched our toast,
And drank our drinks in silence.

“What will you do?” I asked,
As though I hadn’t several times before,
And you said, “I arrive in Dallas
Around 6, I think, and then
It’s off to school. The program starts at 8.”

Twenty minutes later,
On the shell driveway,
We said a quite banal goodbye,
Me with my duffel bag,
And my old car was soon back on
The shoreline road, for 23 miles until,
I got back to the Interstate.

A breakup is like a knockout punch:
But this was more like
Us calling off the fight because
You had a better offer out-of-town,
And me understanding, because
It made sense for business.

Of all the mornings we’d spent in that kitchen
The one I remember best is me eating dry toast
And drinking a flat Dr Pepper
And wishing the runners on the beach

Had taken me with them

Morning Coffee

On 2019122220191222 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original PoemsLeave a comment

Sitting at our kitchen table,
Eating cereal with sugar,
Watching them go through the careful
Ritual of making coffee

Always, bigger kids and grown-ups
With their ceremonies daily;
This one, with a smell like almonds,
Orange light from pewter shining

Steam from off of cups while carried,
One who stops for milk and sugar,
While another straight to sipping
Plows into the morning paper

Parents can be such a mystery —
What are all these words they’re reading?
Worried brows across the table,
Span that seemed a hundredfold –

Sitting at our kitchen table,
Eating cereal, observing;
Memories like fresh-brewed coffee
Full of steam, then disappearing

Swingsets (III)

On 2019112820191128 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original PoemsLeave a comment

When you were six,
On Christmas break,
I took you to
A schoolyard swing;
We ran and laughed
All bundled up,
Your eyes so full
Of everything —

But we lived in
A diff’rent town:
Your mom and I
Now far apart,
Could not have known
What was to be,
The broken vow,
The wounded heart

That let you bruised
When still a boy;
This man you knew
And came to trust,
Who ran with you
By schoolyard swings,
And made up stories
In the dust

Of what are now
Your memories.
For what is it
Stepfathers do
But keep on loving
Even when
Their marriages
Are long since through,

The children who
Were trusted them,
Who though grown up
And far away,
Are somehow, somewhere,
Still just six,
And dressed for cold
And joy

And play

Swingsets (II)

On 2019112820191128 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original PoemsLeave a comment

He’s eighteen, he’s grown-up, and yet
He turns these memories over in his hands,
Like toys he used to love
But cannot bring himself to ever show.

It’s summer in the early night,
He’s wandering the streets
Of this hometown he cannot wait to flee.
He knows it’s time to be
Responsible, to make his way,
To cast aside the childish things
That meant so much to him
Not long ago.

He’s eighteen now, grown-up, and yet
He turns these feelings over in his mind,
Like some stuffed animal
He clung to as a kid when he was scared.

A block from plaza discount stores,
The playground where he used to run,
Negotiating sandy bits of conflict,
Now he leans upon the fence, but this
Has changed its aspect now for him:
Like noticing the castaway beer bottles,
Empty condom wrappers, and detritus
Congregating near the rusty barrels
Used as trash cans. Once, he only saw
The field, the sand, the swingsets, and
The other kids; but now he knows, that
Growing up means ugliness
Unleashed.

He’s eighteen and afraid, and yet
He takes it all in, musingly,
For noticing
May change the way he feels, but doesn’t really
Mean the world has changed.

And still, he turns it over in his mind,
Like toys from Vietnam,
His father sent him when
A wooden elephant
Meant he would be back soon and safe;

But soon and safe

Don’t go together now

Swingsets (I)

On 2019112820191128 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems1 Comment

Like a ghost, I wander,
There’s my father sitting on a bench,
My mother talking to
Two other women in their once-bright
Summer dresses,
While my sister, acting cool,
Is lounging on the grass
Out with the big kids
Over by the woods.

Like a spirit, hovering,
I hear the squeaky sounds of kids,
Like sneakers on a gymnasium floor,
My brother and me,
Dressed for swimming,
Swinging ever higher,
Letting go in perfect arcs
Of weightlessness that last
Until we land.

Only with clouds gathering
And wetness in the air solidifying
To we begrudgingly head back to bicycles
And cars, my family walking back
Towards a cinder-block house
My sister furtively looking over her shoulder
At the tall dark-haired boy,
My brother looking up ahead at
The water tower,
And me wondering why
My father and mother never walk

Side-by-side

“… the world is new.”

On 2019111820191118 By Beleaguered ServantIn Personal Essays3 Comments

“In memory yet green, in joy still felt,
The scenes of life rise sharply into view.
We triumph; Life’s disasters are undealt,
And while all else is old, the world is new.”

– Isaac Asimov

It’s 6:21 in the morning, and I’m dressed for work. I’ve been up since 3:11 am, which is not that unusual for me. I’ve done 40 minutes at the gym, watched a bunch of football highlights, put out the garbage and recycling, and read a few work emails in the last 3 hours. I normally would already be at work, but something is wrong with my car, so I’m waiting until 7 when the auto repair place opens to bring it by.

I think it would be hard for most people to imagine living my life; but then, I think it’s hard to imagine living anyone else’s life. Most of us could not have imagined that we would live the lives we have lived. This is because life is big and full of randomness, and by “randomness” I mean, things outside of our control.

Most of us authors / introverts are kind of control freaks: in our works, we can make things come out like we want them to. This is rarely true in actual life.

This time last year, I was sitting beside my mother’s hospice bed in Green Valley, Arizona. The almost three weeks I spent there are a part of me now. My mother’s view of life was that we are all just links in the chain: she had seen her parents pass, and they had seen theirs, and so on.

I think seeing her three children made it easier for her at the end (we were taking turns, several weeks at a time). She said to me, at the end of a day when she’d mostly slept, “I’m so glad you’re here.”

I grew up near the beach in Northwest Florida, the youngest of her three kids. We still have photos of a time my parents took us out to the beach in the fall, just to take pictures.

And yes, it was warm enough to go barefooted. I was, I believe, 6 or 7 years old.

My mother’s journey took her from upstate New York all over the world. My mother-in-law, who lives in town and is ninety-one years old, was born here after her family fled Russia/Poland to escape antisemitism. She’s lived a life impossible to imagine, although I ask her about it every chance I get.

Life is a great chain, I think: we are all connected, both back through our ancestors and to each other. But each link is still different, with unique memories and experiences.

And while we can’t fully imagine each other’s lives, it’s worth trying.