Not No Guns
Why not make it harder
As in better
To get guns?
Harder meaning safer
Better checks
Shared accountability
If you are a crazy person
Then I apologize
But you should not have a gun
You need better aid
Than that
Guns will not be your help
Epiphany
Epiphany. Twelfth Night. The magi come upon the infant Jesus at his family’s home. They are amazed. They give gifts. A tribute.
Epiphany means discovery. An ordinary act that brings new insight to life. The magi, I imagine, were not ordinary people, though what they did was hardly unusual. Many traveled land to land and town to town back when. The caravans were living roads to make trade and civilization possible.
They are not the only ones who had read and studied the stars to find alternative direction. Astrology, astronomy. They were blurred pursuits in this region of the past. There was meaning in the sky. The seasons brought us learning there. We looked for all these.
But when these magic persons, in their learn(ed) wisdom of the world, travel west at last to find this child at home, sameness leaves their lives and all the worlds’. Forever.
What did they discover? What was realized? They beheld a person who meant change.
How so? Two thousand years and some, we still ask.
Receipts
I’ll keep these for a time
Since they mark and note
The trip I took not so far
Away or so long ago
Pay slips from the turnpike
To represent my drives
Out and back, a map of
A town back home I found
At a station kiosk—sometimes
These are surprise-filled
Documents, even for a
Place I know
Coffee receipts out, those
For sandwiches on the
Way back in
Business card for a city
Place, the kind of which
We do not have in my
Small town, but at which
I had lunch with my family
Saint Vincent de Paul, whose
Thrift store I visited with my
Sister, where I bought a small
Piece of clear-black glass
An olive oil store—a
Festive, promising
New niche place—I
Got a narrow bottle of
Honey-serrano vinegar
For my brother-in-law
Who cooks a lot
Purchase record for a
Calendar I bought
On sale and then the
Best—a paper testimony
From a local bookstore
How I wish there were
More like this! I had gift
Card, it had the books
There are other neighbor
Places to support—those
Selling food and clothing and
Art-expression pieces from
Those makers starting out
Close by
But these books will do
They were my part in
My going, my time away, and
My returning afterward
My small trip—for
Now, a small-documented
Odyssey
Pilgrim Path
Someday I’d love to walk
The path to Compostela, Spain
The pilgrimage of Saint
James and to his honor
Legacy, the pilgrim trail
I’d like to walk with company
I hear folk band together
On the way
The pilgrim path need not
Be done by one to count
God counts the pilgrim
In the heart, where the
Real path of challenges is trod
not in praise of artificial
inspired by “Good Things” by angieinspired
everything that’s natural is good
of course, that’s not true
tell it to a hurricane
a mindless celebration of water
and force that would as indifferently
snuff out the candle of your life
as it might look at you
which it won’t, because
it does not care, it can’t
it’s only being
natural
Thee Bee of Mee
inspired by a typo
Tut-tut rain, Christopher Robin
Says because he wants to fool the
Bees into distraction so that his
Mud-cloud bear might swipe honey
From their tree; the bear so-loved
Is grasping a balloon, and bear
And balloon are lifted up toward
A relished but unplanned
Reward of something sweet and
Lasting ‘til the next time the bear
Wants honey—I love the stories
And was named for the bear’s
Boy, who also went down to
The palace with Alice
Paraphrase
Of A A Milne—life by
Christopher Robin
And by me
Tut-tut rain, we say
ISIS doesn’t like the arts
The terrorists brought down marvels
in ancient statues and friezes, having
murdered the curator defending these
and having no gun. They fired with guns
into a Paris concert venue, while the music
played and fans were sinuously in
tune, young ones with blissful
countenance and their own song. For this
was Friday night, and love for music
elevates. “They don’t like music,” Bono
claims, and he is right—art and
beauty have no place
in the terrorist agenda. So
dangerous must be the muse’s power
to prod a people into thinking and loving
with all art’s inspiration. So
much is beauty feared in the
mad-monger’s eye that it must be
demolished. And so we must see straight
and straighter. Protect our people, fight
back, and preserve our beloved and unique
intuitions and expressions. We must
remember, too, this is not a war on
Islam, whose tenets teach welcoming
and prayer. But what we make—which
is the poem’s meaning, that is, to
make—is taken now as part of who
we are. Life is better. Yet art moves
the heart, wakes up the mind: opening
our better selves. This terrorizes terror.
All Souls, a Poem
A remembrance of those who are far on
And yet, like Patrick’s breastplate, who
Are over and around us
Above, below, on either side
We are not alone this day; we are
Accompanied
By those whose earthly, counted time
Is done, who
Live in kairos now
Kairotic time, the time of God
Souls, the spirits
of un-never-lived, live
On, live now, live well
Until unmeasured time
Without measure
Ends
C L Couch
Our Way, Friend and Friends
(“My Way” is a song written by Jacques Revaux, Claude Francois, Gilles Thibaut, Paul Anka—popularly recorded by Elvis Presley and by Frank Sinatra)
“And now, the end is near
So I face the final curtain”
A melancholy song about endings
Though it’s kind of a conceit
Not based on final assessment
Or judgment in life
But an expression, a claim
A kind of righteous claim on life
“Regrets, I’ve had a few
But then again, too few to mention”
Yes, we have regrets, and I don’t know
About too few
I would change things; so, I
Think, might you
We don’t act, we don’t choose
In a vacuum of discretion, since
What we enact, from inner to outer
Performance, affects others, too
It does—we might think, one by
One, we have no power
And what we do does not matter
But we do, and it does
“The record shows I took the blows
And did it my way”
Well, the blows fall all around
And others are affected, too
The song is a cheat—though I like
The tune—for there is good
In the reality of knowing we are not
Isolate, even in responsibility
We work together, however
Unconsciously
So let’s do it consciously
And so we have: we have worked
Together, and for what we’ve made
I’m thankful
Thank you, thank you, each and all, for
Making it, not one
But more than one
For doing it our way
Our way, better
Our way, real
Our way, our way
C L Couch
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