Promise

By Judson Mitcham

Those back roads traveled me all my life.
Time spent me in idleness, wasted me.

Small towns passed through me, the old
melodies put me on and played me,

and stars used me to reckon with.
Maybe the truth tried to find me out.

A little history learned me. Right away,
it forgot. An odd dream, here and there,

understood me. The same old stories
told me over and over, and my soul

tried to save me, until
the day night walked off into me, alone,

when a promise broke me.

You Tell On Yourself (Author Unknown)

You tell on yourself by the friends you seek,
By the very manner in which you speak,
By the way you employ your leisure time,
By the use you make of dollar and dime.

You tell what you are by the clothes you wear,
And even by the way you wear your hair,
By the kind of things at which you laugh,
By the records you play on your phonograph.

You tell what you are by the way you walk,
By the things of which you delight to talk,
By the manner in which you bury deceit,
By so simple a thing as how you eat.

By the books you choose from the well-filled shelf
In these ways and more you tell on your self.

A Child is Something Else Again

Yehuda Amichai

A child is something else again. Wakes up
in the afternoon and in an instant he's full of words,
in an instant he's humming, in an instant warm,
instant light, instant darkness.

A child is Job. They've already placed their bets on him
but he doesn't know it. He scratches his body
for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet.
They're training him to be a polite Job,
to say "Thank you" when the Lord has given,
to say "You're welcome" when the Lord has taken away.

A child is vengeance.
A child is a missile into the coming generations.
I launched him: I'm still trembling.

A child is something else again: on a rainy spring day
glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the fence,
kissing him in his sleep,
hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles.
A child delivers you from death.
Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.

Poem Without an End

Inside the brand-new museum
there’s an old synagogue.
Inside the synagogue
is me.
Inside me
my heart.
Inside my heart
a museum.
Inside the museum
a synagogue,
inside it
me,
inside me
my heart,
inside my heart
a museum

Faith

By David Whyte

I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,

slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself
I refuse it even the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

Very early this AM I had some beautiful haiku centered moments with a dear old friend. Here are some haiku he shared:

Breathing by a lake
Creation flows in and out
Blessings from above

The lake in my mind
Ripples flowing gently out
At One with above

Purring and so wise
On my papers so handsome
My four legged child

Had it and lost it
Pre coffee or just old me
With my friend Reb Neil

Monte (Peace In Our Time)

By David Kirby

Once I got a postcard from Joyce Carol Oates,
whose novel Unholy Loves I had reviewed favorably,
and on it (the card) she wrote,
"I think you must be a fellow Canadian,"
and I figured, well! That's me, all right:
the Mounties, Wayne Gretzky, Margaret Atwood. . . .
It wasn't until years later
when I found the card again
while cleaning up some old files
that I saw she had written
not "Canadian" but "Conradian"
(in fact, I had mentioned a Conrad essay
she'd published elsewhere),
and I thought of the poster I'd seen for a Monet show,
only the artist's name was spelled "Monte."
I could see this Monte in his plaid jacket
and his open collar and his medallion
nestled in his chest hairs just so,
calling for a corned beef sandwich,
"very lean, please," and a Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Tonic
so he'd have the energy to finish, say,
Caesar's Palace: The Façade at Sunset.
Names mean too much;
for example, if you called a general "Genital,"
as in, "Your car's ready, Genital--urrk!"
he'd kill you in a fit of rage,
and his bodyguards, confused by the gunfire
and the screaming, would fill the air with bullets
and take him right out of the picture.
Bingo, no more war.