Tuesday Poem: Up From A Long Sleep

Conference 
While an older woman lectures us on Habermas and epideictic writing, based in citizen voice events, notions of complication, and public consequence, 

her ideas hang like twigs in the tightly constructed, multicolored rhetorical nest she is weaving, though we are somewhat distracted by her younger co-presenter, who is trying to hush her feisty three year old, who sings as he draws on the back of her yet-to-be-presented paper, by tearing a page away from the three hundred twenty-eight others 
in the conference program, and folding it into an airplane, which takes off from the table, rising and falling at the end of the little 
boy’s arm, until it comes crashing 
down, like a baby bird at the older woman’s feet, and she slowly stoops to pick it up, never missing a single beat.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version was published by The Paterson Literary Review in 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Milk Time

It was the sacred time: the little cartons

delivered in their plastic crate

by an eighth grade boy

who looked like Gulliver

for a moment, striding through

a cloud of Lilliputian first graders.

A quiet knock, then he’d come in

all hunch-shouldered, quick, and shy,

to set them down next to my desk.

And there they sat, piled in little hills,

like shanties after a cyclone.

How my head spun with the changes

from day to day: This school. No that school.

This classroom that ticks along like a clock,

that one that has no lesson plans, no paper.

This was Paterson, New Jersey.

I was twenty-one: a substitute

who knew nothing about the world

and how it worked.

In one school I nodded

in agreement as the Principal

told me, a red finger nail wagging,

that we must never, never, never

use corporal punishment, no matter

how rude the children might become.

In another I trembled at the Principal’s

booming voice as he hit one of the boys

in front of the class, a trouble maker,

he insisted I identify, and I suddenly

felt so exhausted I let them do whatever

it was they wanted for the rest of the afternoon.

But milk time. Milk time was sacred.

Each one of them carefully opening 

his or her own little house of goodness, 

stepping into a clean white space,

a silence punctuated by an occasional 

bubbling noise, as someone’s straw reached 

into a corner to grab the last few drops.

I didn’t know then that, for many of these

children, this was breakfast. For many of them

ten o’clock rang like an angelus putting an end 

to stomach growls and shaky hands 

that could barely hold a pencil.

All I knew was that at ten o’clock

they sat still. They were quiet, and

they were comforted. I was too.

Sitting at the big desk, in the front of the room, 

I felt like a little girl again, the one 

who stood against the wall in the playground,

watching her classmates ease into smiles 

and whispers, as they filed inside, sat 

at their desks, opened the cartons and savored.

A little girl on the margins, hungry for love.

And here it was: milk time again,

all of us in communion for the time it took,

to swallow that daily ration of decency,

that blessed little half pint that got us through.

Tuesday Poem: An earlier version published by Poetpourri in 1994

 Sculpture by Paul Villinski

Death Called To My Mother

butterfly silent.

Butterflies she loved

and talked about:

their delicacy and color,

their brevity through golden air;

as if the blossoms themselves

had taken flight,

their pollen-rich leaps

from flower to flower,

their nectar-driven reveries.

It was death,

hovering in the garden,

she opened her heart to,

weary as she was of struggling,

and loss after loss, never getting

past the caterpillar's hunger,

over-filling her plate

as if searching for

herself in all that weight.

She didn't know

the word for soul, in Greek,

is the word for butterfly too.

She only knew,

in dreams, they covered her,

like a quilt of shivering wings:

Adonis Blue, Pearly Eye,

Swallowtail, Roadside Skipper.

Come, they whispered.

the chrysalis is waiting.

It’s finally time

for bliss.

Tuesday Poem: previously published in Poetpourri in 1992

The Hunger Angels

first came to her when they were fighting.

Their whispers made her feel 

like she’d put her ear to a seashell.

They told her her father swallowed his anger.

They danced like little fireflies around him,

swirled inside his undertow of loneliness,

swam in his beer, made fun of the white heron

poses, he learned as a boy, in a kitchen

where there was never enough to eat.

She watched them hover like hummingbirds

as they buzzed her mother's fork,

oozed out of her sandwiches, as she took her 

giant bites. When Mommy sat quiet, they gathered 

in her hair, stirring up the racket of memory,

with its abuses, desertions, hard work that made her

disappear into cooking pots, and gourmet magazines.

The little girl watched the two of them

tangle with one another in despair.

The angels multiplied then, their faces

becoming her parents' faces in miniature.

Put us in your hope chest, they said

when she was eight years old.

Someday you'll open it,

and we'll have grown like dumplings,

or steamy loaves of bread.

No head of a pin for us, babe.

We’ll keep you fidgety company.

Just  fire up those cravings.

In her innocence she welcomed them,

glad to be included, not knowing

how else the story might have gone.