10/24/19

Our chalkboard poems for the last few days …

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I spent some quality time today quietly re-reading some of my poems. I keep them in binders, and today I read a few poems in the collection called “Friends in Blessings”. These are poems – probably a hundred or more – about fictional people in a fictional town in Connecticut called Blessings. As I read them today, sitting in the sunshine in the sunroom, I was deeply moved by many of them. I seemed to sense wisdom in them – wisdom and serenity and openness – and what was wonderful was that I felt – I knew – that these qualities did not come from little ‘me’, but that somehow they flowed out from the infinite universe and landed, by some mystifying design, in my poems. It was as if I was simply a shore and these poems had washed up on me from an infinite poetic ocean. I felt humbly grateful, and also a little overwhelmed by the mystery of it all.

Here is one of the poems I read today …

AFTER 61
(Harrison P., 61, Blessings, CT)

Shortly after his 61st birthday,
he found himself standing beneath wisdom
that rolled like a thousand thunders.
Something made him feel
the strength of youth,
like he was thirteen again
and could do anything,
even math,
and could show sympathy to everything,
even thunderclouds.
He found himself laughing
with the misfortunes of his life
as though they were playful dolphins
from a fairy tale.
He challenged his rascally problems
to games like Chinese checkers,
and he always won.
He felt like a chimpanzee
swinging beneath beautiful wisdom trees
in his happy 60’s,

and he always chose
childish thoughts.

Scenes from today’s snappy 2.7 mile walk in Elm Grove Cemetery …

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…. plus two photos of an unidentified high school English teacher during a trip to France with his students, maybe 12 years ago, shared with me today on Facebook by one of the students on the trip … (I don’t like that mean-looking face at all. He must have been a lousy teacher.)

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