Three Minutes

1. Toast

Let’s hear it

for our favorite

ape, sapiens,

who happens

to have made fire,

and named it fire,

and burned his garden

black. We’re done

with all the tragic

tick-tock.

His vocable

was revocable.

And now, our later

more vague ones: traitor,

brother, enemy,

me. 

2. March

I tell my vanishing tale

to every stranger, over and over,

yet somehow never

the same tale twice, and smile.

Inside each word, society

and lies and truth and I

die away,

and the stranger smiles. It isn’t pretty.

But I intended to make it so,

as General Sherman said.

His war was hell. His red

beard shone in the burning town’s glow.

3. Yellow Stickies

(after Wordsworth)

His daffodils’

dried petals,

stacked and trimmed,

squared up and gummed

to give them a spine.

Please open

your tiny hymnal

now to its final

gold page,

and take courage

as we pretend

to find, and find

something living

we can sing.

           (Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review No.46 (2020))