Poets Walk to Round Pond October 9, 2018

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October fright

Leaving the grocery store tonight I did a double-take

Seeing an aging white man in the check-out line with a Hitler moustache

Going about his business in his ordinary life unaware

The personna he presents in these times scares me.

His facial hair is not some fake fun like a Halloween mask

When today the fascists are in the streets with weapons

When the norms of democracy have been destroyed

When an endless barrage of lies drowns the truth.

This is not only about crooked Donald as if he started it

The demagogue riding in on the racism called birtherism

Spewing all those vicious slanders against people of color

Bragging with impunity about assaulting women.

This is about all the lawmakers and judges in these United States

Exposed as the mask is off the system that kills for profit

Damaging their institutions in the crisis of dead end capitalism

Looting their treasury to grab yet more obscene wealth.

Black Lives Matter!

#MeToo

Fight for $15

No Human Being Is Illegal!

All these struggles are just and righteous

Our contemporary cry out against oppression

Knowing that history is on the side of liberation

Despite our anxiety living in these dark days.

We know the future of human life on earth is in doubt

As long as the irrational climate deniers hold sway

Extracting their profits even from the disasters they make

Demanding of us that we intervene to survive.

Repression can create the will to resist that will grow

Building a mass movement to seize the day

With fearless optimism making it happen

When the youth will make the revolution.

individual plots

We are in a quiet place for our morning walk about

Landscaped trees and lawn in the slanted sun

Shadows cast by polished stones in rows

Cut granite markers inscribed with surnames.

Cemetery thoughts occupy me in my musing as we walk

Where people unknown to me have been boxed under

And yet every body buried here is my close relative

Whose lives were fundamentally the same as mine.

We are visiting here just north of 13 Mile Road

Where every grave dates from the last century

When the Detroit car factories had their heyday

When the future was an interstate highway.

Many of the graves are marked with Masonic symbols

Leading me to imagine what it would look like

If all the script on all the stones were unintelligible

And all the remains here were nameless bones.

You tell me you are thinking how odd it will seem

To some future archaeologist who will unearth them

Trying to understand the strange practice of burial

Taking good land for no good reason.

This place will soon contain only forgotten names

Witness to a host of anonymous life stories

Reminding me that I am already almost anonymous

Having a very common name invisible to search engines.

Our steps cover ground known to you since childhood

Being here close to the house your Aunt Joan still lives in

Shared with your grandmother being two working women

That house full of memories is our destination today.

Your spry Aunt Joan who lives independently regales us

With stories and more stories of the times of her life

Of all the family members you knew growing up there

Passing on this oral history of generations past.

Saying she’s distributing her belongings before she’s gone
Asking us if we want to take her teacup collection

Giving away her prized crystal ware and cut glass

Cleaning out her things happy to know we have them.

The dead are dispossessed with their last breath

Passing on everything material to the living

Taking whatever secrets with them to the grave

Leaving us to keep their memories in our thoughts.

Wallkill NWR October 5, 2018

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