Six Oh Birthday

No, sky I don't need to write my name across your blue today. This day is filled with run and play.

Since the start I was left right silly smart. Boy girl yin yang light dark art. Strong weak messy sweet. Tender hard awake asleep. Good bad puzzle complete.

Yes, Mrs. Applegate, I'm the girl who colored pink and red,
and I'd do it again in a beat,
because broken rules and beauty
are truly very sweet.

The Childless Shoemaker

It would make all of you happy

To know of my interest and fascination

With this German shoemaker,
Great Uncle Henry of Rising Sun, Indiana. 

Me, being the childless descendent

younger brother Daniel
and wife Viola. 

Great Grandfather Daniel valued movement over comfort

Leaving his nest in 1878 with yearning.
Go west young man with a woman who will follow. 

Uncle Henry and Aunt Meg

They stay square with an iron fence.

House full of Victorian fancies,

books, music, lace and roses.

A flat photo traps them in time,

Flowered living room and a gramophone.

Meg in a silk skirt balances a book
While Henry looks on.

The distance widens and separates. 

Daniel and Viola, now live in a fenceless world.
Dust, snakes, and wide open spaces.
Signed with signatures of wagon wheels.

The dapper shoemaker and the farmer with muddy boots
never see each other again.

Daniel and Viola build their Kansas farmhouse
With sunrises at the peak,
painted in pinks, blues, and yellows.

Glory to God they said. Rising Sun.

The Dad Series

Blue Horizon

It was a fly over, a crow’s view from a small plane.

A hot still moment of summer captured

with so much LIFE in a flat photo.

The landscape down there

means much to your daughter.

Our Farm, Our Farm...

Cattle are sprinkled everywhere.

Dad, are you there somewhere? In your favorite chair?

On your tractor? Out on the distant horizon?

I would fall face first from the Kansas sky

if I could find you now.

The Work Shirt

The day after you died,

Mom burned all your boots and overalls with the old tin cans.

She said she'd been waiting for years to do that.

I ask for of your blue work shirt from the closet.

It smelled like manure, and Mom hated farm smells.

The chambray is in my closet now.

With each inhale, the fragrance fades.

Mark of the Beast

Your weathered hands now quietly crossed.

The funeral director asks if there was an accident,
Because the curve of your spine is awkward and bent,

And your forehead is creased
With the mark of a beast.

There was the horse who pinned you in the railroad track,
the tire you changed when your heart said attack,
the day your forehead smacked the Chevy glass,
and a then steer literally kicked your ass.

No sir, we don't know why he won't lie flat.

Corral #5

The chocolate lab was named Obama.
The far sections were North and South Iran.
There was a tractor named Suck Egg.
Everything in your world named with a wink.

Articles came with notes on yellow lined paper
Concerns with commentary cut from headlines.
Mad cows, Washington, casinos on Boot Hill
All signed, love Dad, corral #5.

Kid, the message is you can drink and gamble your way to success.
Kid, got a little break here from corn harvest.
Kid, the USDA man told me airport security is not good.
Kid, we seem to have strong country, I think.

Beloved Babies

Rwanda was a slaughterhouse.

Woke up this morning thinking 

About that blood soaked school

Of death and torture

Graduating class, April 1994.

Anitha tells of her cousin,

Delicate heel sliced with machete.

She falls, no place to hide.

Tall tree lasts a week, 

Chopped down piece by piece.

Turn your head now,

“Don’t tell me more!”

In the land of safety, these things don't happen.

In the land of plenty, this is not our human experience.

Only savages do that.

Flash forward July 2012.

Bloody theater Aurora, Colorado.

Orange headed clown with gun and grin,

Once known as Beloved Baby, soft and pink,

Now known in the world of darker names. 

From outside in

We blame object-

Gun, Parent, Media, Government.

We still can't see inside

The cavern where it boils. 

The heart of darkness is not a place

With borders and directions.

No geography really.

That map walks around on two legs.