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Piecemeal
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I wish there were no war
I wish peace could abound
And not forestall
I wish we made enough
And a little more
For neighbors, strangers,
Celebrations
I wish the world were not a mess
Unless it could come out
Cookies on the other side
And a centerpiece
For a long, long table
Levels and heights to accommodate
With chairs of many sizes
Everyone invited
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C L Couch
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Photo by Obi – @pixel6propix on Unsplash
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How We Ate
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Somehow,
We had turkey
On Thanksgiving and on
Christmas though not at any
Other time of year,
Not even from the deli
We had ham at Easter
Corned beef and cabbage on
Saint Patrick’s Day
Pork and sauerkraut for New Year’s
Cheeseburgers and fries,
Holiday cookies on
Christmas Eve
On Valentine’s my mother would make
And serve a two-later, pink
Heart-shaped cake
Speaking of cake, the Easter cake
Was made into the shape of
A bunny with coconut
For fur
With cardboard ears
The insides colored pink
With the carnation crayon,
Then all laid upon a grass of green-
Dyed coconut with jelly beans
Scattered in the grass
My brother Rick taking black jelly-beans
To place behind the bunny’s butt,
Which aggravated my mother
Every year
That was family holiday food
I could be missing something
We ate well
Better and better,
I’m thinking each year
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Photo by Maddy Hunt on Unsplash
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(no, we didn’t eat bunnies—we were bunnies)
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The War at Home
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1
I’m tired
Too much stress
Has weighed me down
Who knows
What’s heredity
What’s conditioned
By a lifetime of
Pressed down?
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Everyone has a reason
An excuse
For being rude
And mean
In both ways,
Unkind and miserly
My money
Yes, I earned it
Is taken
And I get poor
Products in return
And services
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Does anyone else
Feel cheated
By life?
Does anyone else
Go to sleep
And wake up this way?
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And maybe
It’s not so bad
A friend
Has called and been
Generally sympathetic
And I generally
Feel better
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Still stressed
Still weighed down
I don’t know what
To do
But keep writing
About it all
During which
I was interrupted
By my friend
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And worry about
The news
I’ll find today
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I’d like to find
Me and nature
For a while
The sun, the wind
Some clarity
Of sky
Blue thinking
For a while
Wispy thoughts
That don’t have to stick
Like white dandelion
Seeds
Blown onto thistles
A day of
Unpressed thinking
For a while
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The war at home
Funding on trial
Some money passes
Thankfully
Aid for Ukraine
Rebuilding bridges here
That have
Fallen
Down
Rebuilding, anyway
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I guess we need
To keep moving
Throw off
That Mayberry feeling
That sitting outside
Floyd’s
On a hot day
Is a good thing
Taken down the long,
Front porch
Relegate its place
Build something
Whose plans
Whose generation lies
Around the corner
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Photo by Hans Isaacson on Unsplash
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The Boy Who Knew Something
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A spark of something
Blown on through the breeze
Of time
What did he know?
Something about dreams, perhaps
That dreams try
To work out something
And something about wandering
That loneliness
Is good
That reactive loneliness is hard
But being on one’s own
As a decision for oneself
Is not so bad
Bicycle
Riding across an empty schoolyard
Creeking
Climbing rocks
Falling
There’s a bruise
One survives
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The working out of dreams
When dreams are ridiculed
That’s when it gets hard
Harder than the stones
One fell upon
Growing up will help
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If only there could be an arc
So many things
Could be worked out
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Call it memory
Call it inspiration
Allowed to last
Let it last
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C L Couch
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Photo by Hugo L. Casanova on Unsplash
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Born Again in the USA
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A sabbath time
To stop
To breathe
To wait for it
To be over
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Counting the minutes
Of the homily
Or sermon
The teaching of the word
Waiting for communion
To be over
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Now, where is the car?
How long will it take
To leave?
Thinking about
Food and rest and TV
After
The holy time
Set apart
Once a week if that
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Bigger deal
Maybe wireless
For those who could
Be there
At Christmas and at Easter
What is wrong with
All these things
Is nothing
But set apart is set apart
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Then the chance
To splice it
Graft it all together
Stronger, faster
Like the cyborg hybrid
Only real
Sacred and prophane
With blessings
Rain from an aspergillum
The scent of flowers
From a thurible
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Sensations
Only God
Can bestow
In the world
And the world
Can respond
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Photo by Bas de Korte on Unsplash
“Storm in a few minutes.”
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Who Slew 3G?
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Phone’s dead
As in a horror movie
When the characters
Feel progressively
Closed in
And the killer starts
To take them,
One by one
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It’s a sad day
It’s a widespread problem
For the company
And the old people’s plans
Like my plan
Time to pay one way
Or the other for
The lack of service
All the promises
Smiling gray faces
Provided
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Bakelite phones
With wires
Newspapers
Made of paper
Talking with each other
On the street
Sending the urgent telegram
These might be making
Returns
Should we need to share
In an analog world
Again
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A horror movie
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Photo by Ilinca Roman on Unsplash
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Battle Cry
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The war goes on
I know war from
Reading
All Quiet on the Western Front
Johnny Got His Gun
The Red Badge of Courage
Funny war in
Catch-22
Romantic war in
Anything by Alistair MacLean
And
The Lord of the Rings
I’ve seen videos of
Hiroshima,
And I see images of Ukraine
All of which means
I don’t know anything about war
I don’t know the ripping pain
Of bullets
The sounds from
Many explosions
The sounds of people
Wounded
And the dying
All in states of dying
Mortal life leaving the body
Violent upheaval into judgment
All out of place
Before its time
An outrage of angels
Crying from all sides
The risen and the fallen
I hear stories
Read them
Hear them
Imagine them
And let them in
It’s not the real thing
But it’s something
Enough to think and feel
And cry against
And I have perspective
While those who call for war
Haven’t any
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C L Couch
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Photo by British Library on Unsplash
1914, World War 1. Highland Territorials in a trench. Photographer: H. D. Girdwood.
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Wargodlike
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We’ve known God
For a long, long time
Leaders used to want
To curry favor
So built monuments, set
Time
Struck stone tombs with
Asking after asking after asking
To be let in
In a public sense,
Regardless of administration
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It’s easy now
It’s vogue to say there is no God
So no one to attend
No one to tithe
No one to contribute anything
Except to me
And my circle
Broken, though I do not know
Cursed through an absence of words
Who hasn’t earned ruins
But the detritus in between
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Photo by Matin Tavazoei on Unsplash
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Red Scare
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I was born when
It peaked,
When McCarthy
Was deflated
But it was a cold war,
And we weren’t supposed to
Trust the Soviets
Whoever they were
I didn’t know and
Could only generally
Think about Russians
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But there was the language room
At Pitt
And people from so many parts
Living in the city
And the region
And on TV scenes and shows
With comedy and Russians
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Some of these
Lampooning, no doubt
Some of it relief
As if to say
The Soviets are people, too
And we are people, too
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There were Soyuz model kits
And joined experiments in space
And there was Peter and the Wolf
At the young people’s symphony
And The Nutcracker
At Heinz Hall every winter,
And my sister liked to go
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Communists?
Who were communists?
They wore red stars
Looked grim
Waited in long lines for everything
There was Eloise in Moscow
We looked for the funny KGB character
Appearing somewhere on each page
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There were missiles all over
Here and there
I didn’t see any,
Though there were sonic booms above
From military aircraft
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Blue and silver in the sky
And black and white on TV
How scared should I be?
Sometimes I was pretty scared
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