I am the note
He never read
The note you never gave him
I am love unshared.
The Child Coming
The midwife said,
At some point
In labor, all women
Believe they’ll die.
The terror creeps in.
The heart contracts,
Expels all its hopes
Into the child coming.
Curling her courage,
To speak the fear.
If I die, tell him,
I’d do it again.
Through soul seizure,
And corporal torsion,
Now only the tears
move with grace.
A cry rents the room.
Capitulating, stitching,
Resuscitating her
Wrecked body.
It wasn’t the labor.
It was the battle
To give life-
And yet retain it.
One day, he’ll feel
The same love-terror.
Not for his mother.
But for another.
A mother knows
No expectation
Of receipt. Only
Love paid forward.
Dissonance
In concentric rows they sit,
stand, and display their wildfire
red or tsunami blue plumage
strutting and posing, posturing, like so many
magnificent birds
in heat.
“Look at me!” “Look at me!” They beg
through veneered smiles. Professing truths
with fork-ed tongues.
Forming committees to form
committees. Planning meetings to plan
meetings. Conducting hearings
about the hearings. All-the-while, throwing
shade with sideways glances
as they stamp
out Progress.
The Earth spins, the seasons pass,
crops and wars come
and go
like ant-hill dictators.
Currency, their Commander,
Personal Gain,
their Objective.
The Five Hundred and Thirty-Eight—
this is their Thermopylae.
A Spartan, each they see,
beholding the mirror.
The paper piles high
in the wake
of Battle.
Behold the great deeds.
Proclaim the accomplishments.
Praise the mighty as they
trample
each
other.
Our Lady
She is a gallant, regal lady,
A grand dame, the focus of the town.
She continues in grace and beauty,
Though time and circumstance brought her down.
As the crowd sang “Ave Maria”,
In the quiet flickering without fuss,
The breaking heart of one city,
Became a heartbeat in all of us.
For a moment, all her splendor
May not be quite as apparent to see.
Yet this Lovely Lady will Rise again-
Notre Dame de Paris!
The Gravity of the Situation
History was made today.
You can feel the gravity when five petabytes of information,
Become a single pixelated digital image-
Burning like the Eye of God!
Now we have seen over the brink,
A brilliant mass of high-speed particles,
Illuminating the dark shadow- Black on black!
Accretion Disk and Event Horizon,
Dance with each other in a cosmic Tango-
Whirling Dervishes in space!
Einstein, Sagan and Hawkins never saw,
But always felt,
This hole that falls forever,
Because mass warps space and slows time.
Perhaps, we have seen our future,
Or maybe, finally, Vishnu.
For we have seen the power that is gravity,
And its burning brilliance,
Is become as Death,
The Destroyer of Worlds.
Yet this death is vital as the central focus,
Around which galaxies and life congregate,
In space and time with mass.