Let NOW be your canvas,
Your breath be your brush:
Let no words upon it
To slash, burn or crush.
Live your masterpiece.
Yunus The Grocer
This grocery rhyme in honor of our local grocer.
Yunus the grocer sold his samosas
At two-dollars-fifty a pound:
A savory treat of taters and meat
So very exquisitely ground,
And wrapped in a layer of dough,
All packaged and ready to go.
The Need Of The Hour
All the children we orphan,
All the children we kill:
We can deck every coffin,
But we can’t check our will.
All our tears are fire,
All our mourning is play,
When we look in the mirror
And we must turn away.
Thirty seconds of sorrow
To be ready to preach,
No, the fire burns deeper
Than the heat of our speech.
Take a moment to wonder:
If the tables were turned,
Would we run to hide under
All our family burned.
Time to strangle injustice
With sincerity’s rope;
Time to drown every challenge
In a puddle of hope.
But we’re lost to the darkness
If we’re led by the blind,
And the seeing, all silent,
Simply follow behind.
Fighting fire with fire
Maybe needed sometimes,
But the need of the hour
Is for wide open minds.
Wide. Open. Minds.
Lies
The lies we speak,
And the lies we spread:
One kills our souls,
The other keeps them dead.
Get Your Bearings
The amity of land repels
A sea beset by rancor,
Yet there it is to come alive
Upon the stab of anchor.
Running
I hold on to my run
Like the sun, to the treetops.
“You first,” I say.
“You first,” says sun.
Home.
I look up.
I’ve won.
Inspired by (and picture courtesy): https://www.instagram.com/p/BAfzB89HEaN/
Wonder
I wonder if the wonder I express at all my wondering
Is all the reason needed to explain away my blundering.
The Windy Season
Above a fog of reason,
Beneath a cloud of rhyme,
You’ll find the windy season
Of poetry sublime.
Anytime.
Till We Meet Again
Inspired by this picture, which made the rounds on Twitter a couple days ago.
No mother should see her child die.
No father should bury his child.
But death is no guest to deny
Or turn away unreconciled.
There lives a prophetic example
Of how such a grief may be borne
Through tears in quantities ample
That help mend a heart that is torn.
Yes, weep for the memories cherished
And weep for the times that you miss,
Remember, to honor the perished,
The warmth of each hug and each kiss.
We grieve at the sad separation;
Though every ocean is spanned,
The journey may need preparation,
But know what awaits us is grand.
So let every teardrop flow
In waters of hope come together
To carry us where we must go
Through every gambit of weather.
And there be united again
To never feel burdened by breath,
No grief and no worry of when
For time is the last pick of death.
We pray that our children live long,
To bury us while they are strong.
Recalling an old poem
In the last forty-eight hours, three instances of death have me thinking about this post from many years before.
The rough similarity of these three unrelated individuals to the three characters in my poem is uncanny to say the least. Reality bites.