I wrote a poem in my dream last night. A friend whom I haven’t seen in several years was walking down a staircase and several people whom I didn’t recognize were milling around. I leaned over the top railing and shouted to my friend, “Revise with me!” and then I called out this poem. She stopped to listen, but never replied.
If we start at the same time
from the same place
with my right hand
touching your left
our feet will move together
perfectly.
We saw this coming, saw
your fragility, your fading to whispers.
Even so it still disrupts, still upsets, still
sets our hands to shake,
our eyes to blink too rapidly too often,
our hearts to weigh as heavily
as stone walls.
RIP Queen Elizabeth II
I have never glimpsed you in the delicate
powder of cabbage butterflies flickering
across fields, nor on the frail
wings of earthy brown sparrows
who peck and scrabble at sidewalks,
not even in the gold and rosy braid
painted along the horizon every morning.
But in the torrential battering of rain
pelting grass blades and windows,
flooding streets and cities,
crashing over bridges and shifting
houses from foundations,
you shine.
Twice each day cars
converge on the street out front
as if there is no other journey
to travel from east to west.
Their greed to gain asphalt
is visible from the window, how
they press frontside to backside eager
to move forward. Pedestrians
prance and stride on the sidewalks,
free in the self-deception that they
are not on the same sojourn.
Who thinks about being old
when we’re six or seven?
Like next Christmas, or going
to high school, or being able to read
thick books, tomorrow
is merely a concept
and concept is only
a word that small child can’t pronounce.
But here I am
old, complete with cane and grumpy impatience
and seven years old feels strange now.
One or two things are still the same
sometimes. I still wonder
about where you went those long years past.
Why you could, I couldn’t, and if I ever would.
For myself, I hope
to never have a marked place where stray
souls come thinking to find me,
the way I sought to find you and discovered
only a grave
with a weathered stone.
Buttercups
Who is the bald
old geezer
in this photograph?
Not my erstwhile lover,
surely not
the longhaired,
clear eyed
youth who offered
perfect
yellow blossoms to me
in the palm of his hand.
Early evening light
gentling noiselessly on walls.
Streets emptied of cars.
So young and new and surprisingly scientific,
yet already considered old-fashioned, outdated,
and used only by the desperate to send
information and opinions nobody reads. Everyone
swivels their eyes to avoid seeing
how passé you’ve become. Some even giggle
nervously, then guffaw to cover their
embarrassment.
-Vera S. Scott
28 June 2022
(meant to have been completed April 2022)
brief salvage 