Reflections on Life Situations
Poems #5,6
Funtime
Parks are for kids
and mud
and puddles to fall in
and swings and
skinned knees
and turnstiles that go round merry
and slides and legs that don’t,
and cries of “push me”
and teenaged mothers in tow
behind three-year-old bundles
of an evening’s fun
and male hands black and white
that cooperate to make a carousel,
if not society, swing
and baseball and love and cut fingers
and tears, and sex-filled jeans
and pit stops to a distant bathroom lacking tissue
and eyes sprung wide
with teeter-totter surprise,
and laughter . . .
But mostly parks are for adults
who just want to be kids again,
even for an hour.
May 26, 1975
[Kiwanis Park, St. Joseph, MI]
Driven
Along the rim of the hill they come,
the desert nomads,
heading eastward.
Silhouetted by the morning sun
like pictures on a postcard they appear
single file, nose to tale,
relentlessly moving on,
Pushing their beasts of burden to do their will,
urging them up and down the slopes of
well-worn trade routes that bring
cotton to Cairo and corn to Memphis.
Onward they go, oasis to oasis,
pausing seldom, and then only
for the briefest of time
to take on water and stretch a leg,
their dromedary drones snorting
discontent all the while.
Refreshed, the drivers regroup
their weary charges and press on
through midday into night
hauling their precious cargoes
in search of treasured gold,
with little or painful thought
for themselves or the other treasures
they leave behind.
Better to be a palm tree in the desert,
It would seem, than be a driver of
trucks.
June 14, 1974
[while jogging near Ohio Turnpike, Sandusky, OH]