StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XII, No. X

In many ways I'm still the Sicilian valley girl
Stuck deep inside her rivers delta
With a dozen years of parochial education
Among the twisting sloughs and tule fog.

I am anchored by the bottom land,
Summers full of ripe tomatoes
And tall fresh corn picked by my hand;
The fig tree overshadowing Grandpa's patio,
Three cascades of sweet meaty fruit,
Sharing the upper third always
With the neighborhood birds.

I learned to play whist at the picnic table,
Shaded by the fig, garden in the sun to the right,
Taught by my Grandma and her friend Tomasini
Who defended her full red tomatoes
With rat traps across the neck of hungry robins,
-- Tomasini was not my aunt, I think, but perhaps
A first or second cousin once removed --
While listening to the two of them speak Sicilian
Interspersed with their best post-Ellis American
As the cards were being dealt and played,
Drinking 7-Up in the late afternoon.

I no longer remember how to play whist
-- My grandmother preferred the Black Lady --
But I remember the lazy summer day
They taught a six year old
To play whist with the grown-ups.

Spare, rural Texas, a half barren landscape,
A stripped down Army post surrounded by
Tatoo parlors, pawn shops, aging highways
And a city's worth of chain store sprawl;
This is the home of the American Military,
A war machine bound by checkpoints
Secured by automatic weapons and barb wire;
Eggshell walls, Burger Kings and commissaries,
The spouses and children left behind
Who pretend not to worry about the soldier
Deployed across the wire defending some politician's
Wet dream of ill-defined American interest;
An endless grind of comings and goings,
Dreading the officer who knocks on your door,
Upheavals and uncertainties, broken marriages
And shattered families split asunder by a
Flag draped coffin, the cadence of riflers,
And the singular lonesome moan of a bugle.

In Christchurch, New Zealand, did God decree
The earth should rumble and churches fall
And bodies rot beneath the rubble.

Mankind struggles, rages against fate,
The fault lies less in our fragile humanity
Than the random, impersonal anger of the deeps.

Gaddafi, Qaddafi, we should have bombed ya'
Back into the stone age than let you live
Fat, happy, and high off the transvestite hog;
We showed too much restraint,
Dishonored our American Principles
When we stopped short of killing you
Back when President Reagan was in charge;
Now we have a feckless wonder
Who doesn't even know where the trigger is
Let alone when and how to pull it.

Overall, an efficient commander,
A warrior willing to deploy
Advanced and lethal weaponry
Needed to win the war,
Who supported relentless attacks
On the Confederate forces:
Atlanta and Richmond
Could be sacked and burned
If doing so would end the war
And restore the Union.
Mines, rifled artillery,
Ironclad warships and niter,
Were among the tools he chose
To clean out and defeat
All those who would destroy
The United States of America:
Those who make causeless war
Must ultimately be made to pay;
An unwavering determination
That the rebellion be put down
And our life and liberty restored.

Dogma, sanctity, rules and punishment overweighs our better angels,
Compassion, mercy and forgiveness fall victim to an ever more rigid hierarchy
Populated by Vatican bureaucrats climbing the ecclesiastical ladder,
Priest to Bishop to Cardinal to Pope to Church designated Saint;
Words and deeds carry out the healing mandate, refusing to buckle under
To the rigid authority of silken vestment and spiritual ritualization:
If I still genuflected before the teachings of the Roman Curia,
I would evict myself from the church's philosophical obsessions;
Our path is clear: heal the sick, comfort the frightened,
Visit the lonely, feed the weak and keep vigil over the dying,
Love one another, sisters and brothers, for we are all but
Fragile creatures dependent on the universe's good will
And the bounty of a small blue planet that has forgiven us more
Than we have ever had any right to deserve or even expect.

For all I know, we are
Permanently between storms,
The stuff from the south
Still coming up the coast
To meet all the weather still
Dropping down from the Great Lakes'
But, at the moment,
Despite the gray snowy skies,
The world is at peace,
At least it is if you don't pay any mind
And wear your winter coat outside.

The dog has a limp,
The poet has a gimp,
The professor has a squirrel
That leaps from tree to tree.

All around the Washington bush,
The Sec Def chased the weasel,
HRC thought it was all in fun,
Pop goes the weasel.

Hey ho, what do you know?
The world's turned upside down.
Hey ho, what do you see?
A white haired man setting us free.
A white haired man setting us free.
A white haired man setting us free.

I could spend a year on each of my poems,
Working on perfection and critical adulation,
Or I could be more like Bill Shakespeare,
Kicking out poems and plays on demand,
Not all of them held to some mythical
Standard of high brow excellence.

Perfection bores me, cripples the lyrical verse
That sets me apart from most accademically
Approved scriveners of carefuly constructed metaphor;
But neither am I the ragged street performer
Who spontaneously proclaims my angry civil rant,
Found folk art is the darling of the university professor
And media reporters looking to appear relevant and hip.

I arrived here unheralded and am still not christened
by those who circulate chap books and pithy intellectual
Discussions of meter and ragged ancestoral honors.
As much as I would write for immortalilty,
I also realize we are all groundlings at our heart,
Creatures of flesh and blood whose lives crawl along
Unnoticed by the coastal arbitrators of urban taste.
From lower class dust I come, to those arms I shall soon return,
Only these few poems will exist to show
I once lived and breathed and briefly walked
Among the many peoples of mother earth.

The Mediterranean erupts in violence,
The southern rim aflame in rebel fervor,
Our President remains coldy silent
Until he sees the results of the polls and
Can distinguish between winners and losers.

Nothing is his fault, not ever, in this
He is quite articulate, vagueness and passivity
Are the order of the day, quiet concern
His weapon of choice while nations burn
And dictators use armies against their citizens.

A clear set of principles is unavailable,
Re-election is two years off, the underlying
Mandate is to ensure renomination,
Positioning the President for 2012:
Offend not the base, do not take a stand,
Less failure stain his immaculate aura.