For Edwin

Evidently
It’s
Hubble’s birthday

Happy Birthday

Your gift
To us
Rendering so many things
More clearly

Maybe our gift
To you
Our continued faith
In the sky


World Children’s Day

Today
As well
If we remember taking boxes ‘round
With
Trick or Treat for UNICEF
Collecting quarters
Then millions of quarters for
The cause

The cause of
Children
Need we say it

Though we forget
We adults
Forget
Leaving children inside schools
Or not counting them at all
(beyond
certain
grids)
Until they’re grown up
Into rivals
For our power
For our love

In the mean time
They are forgotten fodder
Uncounted
In the strategies for
War

Women and children
We still say
Which
Didn’t work
On liners
Any more than battlefields
Inside
And in back of

Loss
Hunger
And
Disease

And worse on them
Than on
The older us
Which we older ones might not
Want
To believe

Even though
The wretched things attack
Hope
In the young
As well as young awareness

Okay
We’ll say
And even mean
They are precious
And
They are our future
And they are precious
And
They are our
Present


Last Work of the Day

I think
Not of life
But
To move on a little
Unzip the sweater
Change
The shoes
And leave the make-believe
Awhile

How about
As is supposed to happen
We take the feeling of the sweater
The softer shoes
And
Made-up imagination
With us

Then meet
With feathered insights
Muscled inspiration
On
As has been said
The morrow


C L Couch


Photo by Lawrence Chismorie on Unsplash

Alexander Calder, the sculptor/mobilist whose work is featured here (in Switzerland), constructed a mobile for the children of Pittsburgh, which floated near the entrance to the Carnegie Museum—a favorite thing for me, when a child, to behold

Pittsburgh references to Mister Rogers, too