Comfort Rocks

The rocks beckon
with meditative comfort
beside the abiding sea

too large for prayer beads
solace nonetheless
within their rounded heft

soothed by solidity
I feel free to exercise
my cosmic affiliation

anchored to land
roaming the ocean vista
embraced by all-inclusive sky

philosophy falls away
no explanations needed
to understand existence.

Grand Central Station

Densely packed, dark specks seething
in several directions
among an occasional red
that stops the moment
then switches on again
and the hordes horde
the throngs throng
in the manner of Brownian motion.

Museum Passage

Ethereal this
imagined that

garish trees
dark, blocky rocks

flat-faced portraits
from shared gene pool

banal tools
arranged, labeled
lying impotent
without hands and feet

too many ships
in tarnished light
plying the waters
of languid seas

canvas overstuffed
with lobster traps
ensnares as one falls
promptly off the stack.

Fall Foliage #12

Bored with summer-green fashions
Mother Nature's ready
for sassy, new fall apparel

darker shades bleached first
for comely, chartreuse look

dabs of bold, brash scarlet
added on for random charm

tie-dyed, rainbow spirals
flung across her forest-dress

complemented soon after
with rich batiks of somber bronze

now Mother Nature's wearied
of changing and adjusting
her lush, autumnal ensemble.

Trial by Conscience

I   Indictment

Wrestling with family histories
exhumed in genealogical digs

darker plots found entangled
within slavery's iniquitous web

muted now are heroic imaginings
of long-ago ancestor stories

escapees from brutish poverty
in perilous, ship-tossed transits

come to hack out autonomous lives
at edges of Edenic wilderness

obsessed to own new-world land
free from British feudal bondage

clans patrilineal and matrilineal
settled on unclaimed tracts

in South Carolina's piedmont
and on North Carolina's coastal plain

there seventeen family households
traded their souls for immoral gain

reaping cash from tobacco and cotton
with labor of African-American slaves

starkly tallied in national censuses
from 1790 to emancipation

catalogued as well in estate accounts
and wills as only first-name chattel.

II  Mea Culpa

Now I know...now I know
this inhumanity taints my blood

I must and will bear witness
against this past abomination

I acknowledge, regret, abhor
all hurtful, humiliating acts

wrought with despotic white-power
by my slave-owning forebears

as their present voice and conscience
I offer too-long-withheld remorse

and posthumous apologies to Sissyfus,
Mosley, Berry, Wade, Reuben, Hannack,

Rebecca, Sara, Long Jack, Short Jack,
Cindia, Mattie, Haywood, Lucy, Annie,

Sukey, Dinah, Caster, Rouse, Gatsey,
Dick, Sohee, Old Titch, Jimmy, Rose,

Judah, Moses, Winne, Esther, Cato,
Abraham, Peter, Sarah, Lyd, Phil, Boe,

Nelius, Sam, Clary, Beck, China, Ben,
Patience, Dave, Fanney, Bob, Hannah,

Punch, Amos, Jacob, Little China, Tom,
Poll, Washington, Daniel, Nelly, Rachel,

York, Avey, Noel, Lewis, Dave, Elveda,
and all the unknown, unnamed others.

III  Verdict 

Be it affirmed and declared again
in the name of all Humanity

here to far-distant, global places
for now into the enduring future

all people of any gender and color
are of necessity created Equal

endowed with certain unalienable,
secure, unequivocal, categorical,

protected, defended, inviolable,
absolute, immutable, sacrosanct,

self-evident Rights of Life, Liberty,
and the protean Pursuit of Happiness.

Lost in Poetry Dystopia

Who will memorize postmodern poetry
essayed lines without rhyme or rhythm

chock-full of hanging metaphors
blended into stranger fantasies

problematical to understand
alienated from this reader's grasp

hallucinatory glimpses of something
extraneous to everyday mazes...

where are the dictated paths not taken
endless fields of golden daffodils

grieving lilacs beside the dooryard
narrow fellows in tall, wayward grasses

candles burning swiftly from both ends
love's labors lost in liquefied clothes

feathered things in wordless choruses
darkling plains and ravens everywhere...

why more and more rhapsodic verses
swapped for Jabberwockian leaps

distorted by uber-cubist visions
crammed with kaleidoscopic shards

of fractured contexts, oblique precedents
and densely elliptical idioms

all pounded, pressed, precipitated
into exquisite morass of tangled language.