Poets' Corner
This main function of this section of the site is to allow members to share their creative muse with the rest of us. There is no attempt at laureate status. Just people sharing little pieces of themselves that we might get to know each other better. To ensure complete freedom of the pen, we must state that any thoughts, feelings or opinions expressed here are strictly those of the writer. Do you have something you would like to share with us? Just drop a line to vistauu@att.net .
Table of Contents
Strawberry Music Festival
For Joe
Her Name was Hildy (a song)
Differences
Unitarian Universalists Beliefs
Girl of Your Dreams
A Soul
The Price of War
The War at Our Doorstep
Grazing cattle near Wolfe Ranch in Utah
Carlsbad Caverns
Crescendo
O Wise Laundress
Diapers
Laundry: A Country-Western Sonnet
The Housewife's Lament (a song)
Most of you know Gerrie from her singing. But she also works in stained glass and writes an occasional poem or song. When not playing or working on one of her fourteen musical instruments, she teaches beginning guitar and violin.
Strawberry Music Festival
I watch the grown man move with childlike grace,
weaving in and out among the dancers
I stand and move my arms, slowly, and trace
the little lines of freedom---
the kindness of this place.
Music pours out across the people
and generates a softness floating there.
For just one day I’ll fly upon the sound
and breathe some gentle magic in the air.
And for this little while,
no need for my defenses
I’ll fill my soul
and live
with no pretenses.
For Joe
Put your head against
this sweet and ample bosom.
Come rest here against the
ravages of time.
I’ll touch your skin and ease
the yearning of your arms
to hold something…
that will stay
beyond the years.
Her Name Was Hildy
(A song)
And her name was Hildy
And she played a mean piano
And his name was Ed
And he wore a grey fedora
That he tipped at all the ladies
As he walked down the avenue
In New York City
In a time recalled with love.
Oh yes Mama..I remember you
Sweet Mama with so much to do
Six children and more problems too
Play more Mama
Play more Mama
I would love to sing
Play more mama
Play more mama
Joan, Jane and Pat would ring
She was always good at hugging
And she was always good at touching
But she was best
At playing the piano.
And her name was Hildy
And she played a mean piano
And his name was Ed
And he wore a grey fedora
That he tipped at all the ladies
As he walked down the avenue
In New York City
In a time recalled with love.
Oh Papa, I remember you
Mr Schoeler with so much to do
Six children, and work problems too.
Sometimes we would walk
On the edge of New York City
And look for the Indians
That my father said were there
Well, we never found and Indian
But we enjoyed the walking
And the stories…”that were so convincing”
Oh Papa sometimes you were a problem
What can I say about that now
Sometimes the days were stark
And we were frightened in the dark
And we didn’t understand
That he was hurting inside
“that she was hurting inside”
Wherever you might be
I hope that you love me
And that you know/that I can see
..that..I love you now
It took a long long time
to understand what you had given me
But..that’s the way it is
“Yes, that’s the way it is”
And her name was Hildy
And she played a mean piano
And his name was Ed
And he wore a grey fedora
That he tipped at all the ladies
As he walked down the avenue
In New York City
In a time recalled with love.
Joe Henchy spent thirty five years in the computer business and still escaped with feelings. Being a UU all that time helped. He enjoys seeing what's behind the message in our programmed world.
Differences
The enlargement of the human brain
has allowed men and women to
become almost separate sub-species,
instead of just gender variations.
Nowhere is this more apparent
than how we relate to our clothes.
Let us look at
a woman and her dress
and a man and his shirt.
A woman tires of her dress
in fairly short order.
The intoxication fades.
The joy diminishes.
The pride slips away.
At six months, the dress
Sits on a hanger that
Is moved, not removed.
A man, on the other hand,
grows closer to his shirt.
Each year increases the bond.
At six years, his wife tells him
Goodwill called and specifically
Asked to pick up that shirt.
Six months later, his friends ask
if he’s trying for food stamps.
Finally, while looking in the mirror
he could clearly see his nipples
through his best shirt.
On to the hunt where
the differences increase.
A woman gears up to shop.
Scans ads, plans itineraries.
Selects a friend for confirmation.
Primed, they set out for the mall.
Through stores large and small,
she tries on dozens of dresses.
The only trait they share is
looking nothing like the old dress.
At last, from inspiration or exhaustion,
she finds the dress that will spice her life.
It shows her good points.
Hides her bad ones.
Makes her younger.
Life is good.
A man puts on his special shirt.
Drives to the store of its origin.
Walks up to the first clerk he sees.
“I want another shirt like this.”
To his surprise and chagrin,
they don’t stock it anymore.
Luckily, he has a plan B.
“Gimme the closest you got.”
Since men’s fashions only
change once every ice age,
The match is very close.
He grumbles, takes it and leaves.
His total time in the store,
eight minutes, twelve seconds.
That night, preparing to go out.
She bathes and scents herself,
dons her sexiest underwear
and marvels in the mirror at
the difference the dress makes.
He finally tries the shirt on,
grumbling the label itches.
Turns out to be the price tag.
Grumbles it will never fit.
To raise his mood, she says,
“You look hot in your new shirt.”
A shy smile and lifted head.
“Do you like my new dress?”
“You bought a new dress?”
Unitarian Universalist Beliefs
What’s a UU believe in?
We each have our own drum.
What’s your dogma?
It’s personal.
Do you believe in God?
Which one?
Any one.
Sure, just name a God.
Some UU’s are bound to worship he/she/it.
We have Junitarians, but they’re not kosher.
There’re Christian Unitarians, an oxymoron to you.
I guess Atheist and Agnostic Unitarians are too.
But I’m an Agnostic and the human spirit is my Deity.
What about a symbol? A star or a cross?
Oh yeah, we have a ?.
We have more questions than answers.
Seems a lot of the answers aren’t working.
I don’t see what holds you people together?
Each of us would probably say it a little different.
But we dream, work for and believe in a world
where every baby that comes to us is wanted.
She is touched by love every day of her life,
He never knows fear from the hands of others.
Her spoon is never empty before she’s full.
He drinks water as pure as his soul.
We stretch their minds to full flower.
Their work brings joy as well as income.
They always give back as they get.
They enjoy life fully and their mark,
whether great or small, leaves this world
a better place than they found it.
That sounds like Heaven on Earth to me.
Couldn’t think of a better place for it.
The Girl of Your Dreams
Tired of chasing that butterfly of love?
Can not reach that girl of your dreams?
But she is all around you in every way.
She is them. The girls of your dream.
Not counting the hormonal fantasies,
you have only one dream, happiness.
There is no special girl destined for you.
There are quite a few girls out there who
could bring you a lifetime of happiness.
Your choice is wide. But then so is theirs.
The mating game is not magical mystery.
Winners dream a future of the possible
and choose a winner to make that reality.
Losers dream a future of the impossible
and accept a loser to keep on dreaming.
That’s logical, people aren’t. We have love.
And you are filled with love as you marry.
You may be short some traits, but opposites
attract, she usually has what you’re missing.
Start the marriage mixer and bring on life.
The wedding was great, don’t feel fulfilled.
For marriage is not an answer, it’s a start.
Is she the girl of your dreams? The finding
is retrospective. You control the answer.
Legend says if you buy a jar on your first day,
Add a bean when you make love the first year,
take a bean when you make love after that,
the jar will never empty. This is as it should be.
Those beans are the stepping stones to meld an
overture of infatuation to a symphony of love
Those stones are slippery , the path is difficult.
You’re not alone, she’s struggling just as hard.
You will also find out another hard truth of life.
Women are even more different on the inside.
Don’t go there. None have ever returned happy.
Embrace the sweet soft mystery that is her.
You may think it is wrong to fight with someone
you love. If you don’t fight, you are not in love.
And if you fight all the time, you are not in love
Don’t ask how much is right. Because the answer
to half the questions about marriage is maybe
and the answer to the other half is sometimes
Since she is a woman, the answer is often both.
The early years are a sine wave of altercations
and intimacies, with the former often causing
the latter.They weave a vibrant fabric that is
strengthened by the thread of vulnerability.
She knows more about you than anyone else
in this world and she still thinks you are great.
Don’t get smug, the children are coming.
The tsunami of parenting will rip out any
me left in your being. They come in small
totally dependent packages. Then they grow
and learn to think.. Finally, they add sex to
their phantasmagoric muddle. Your job is
to protect and guide them through all this.
Don’t forget the girl you brought to this dance.
At times, her arms will be your only sanity.
Marriage is a high wire act, she is your net.
All she asks is that you feel she is special.
Eventually, they emerge as young adults.
Remembering Mother’s and Father’s days,
but sure they could have done a better job.
Fret not my friend, revenge is sweet. Soon
these sophomores of life will bear their own.
They’re gone. They took their laughter and love.
The house is empty. It’s a time of rediscovery.
You, who once felt you knew all the answers.
She, who somehow never said you were wrong.
So where does this one girl being my destiny
come from? When you’re on the twilight side
of the hill and counting your chips, you will
find it impossible to believe you could have
ever made it through life with anyone but her.
A Soul
Mortal or immortal.
Real or imagined.
An answer or an excuse.
Its proof?
The consistency of my being.
Where is it?
Deep, deep inside.
Beyond my mind.
A place I can't find.
But still know exists.
It is a holy place.
The essence of my being.
All of my goodness is cradled there.
I can't touch it.
I can't see it.
But all I do is because of it.
Some thoughts or feelings are stained by fear
on their way out of my mind.
My soul wants them back.
Sometimes I sense my soul.
But when I reach for it.
I just find a feeling
and know it's been there.
The closest I've been?
Music,
if I surrender completely,
takes me to the edge of my soul.
What Price War?
The list is long. I only saw a few.
Plastered to a hillside by H&I machine gun fire.
Each vertical and horizontal strafe coming closer.
Frozen with terror. Unable to move.
Six feet. Two feet. The next one kills me. The next…
Silence. Sweet, lovely, blessed silence.
Our machine gunners stopped just in time.
An explosion. The radio crackled, “casualty with two flat tires.”
I went with the corpsman, carrying a stretcher.
The guy I came in the Corps with had stepped on a shoe box mine.
I brought his boots back to the stretcher, with his feet still inside.
An old mama-san washing clothes on a rock.
A horny Marine who needed some.
“Too old, sargie” she whimpered.
He left her a cigarette.
Attack!
Ten minutes of shooting, shouting, screaming.
Pull back.
Three wounded, one dead.
“A perfect raid” said the Lieutenant.
Are you going to put that in the letter to Sam Brown’s mother?
But each war has its own twist.
This one's logo is emerging.
Limit the impact to the public.
Send the same troops back
over and over again. But the
Human mind is not a rubber band.
Stretched too often. It snaps.
Hadditha, Hamdania, Mahmoudiya.
You were against this war.
Did you do everything you could to stop it?
You were for this war.
Have you opened your eyes in the last three years?
No. There is plenty of room on the triggers
of Hadittha for all of our fingers.
We must now accept the ultimate price of war.
Our humanity.
Karen is an activist in the highest sense of the word. She is active both inside and outside the Fellowship in causes that seek to save the planet from misguided destruction. Karen lives very close to Camp Pendleton and their preparations for Iraq are too close to reality for her.
The War at Our Doorstep
Boom! Rumble....rumble...boom....boom....BAM!!
Steady pounding shakes the hill on which I live.
The house shudders.
Dishes rattle in the cupboards.
The Marines are practicing again,
Playing their deadly war games.
Once I could ignore the barrage.
Now I can no longer tune out my awareness.
With inner vision I see the flash, the burst of flame,
The flying bricks and glass, the twisted cars and busses.
Worst of all, I see the severed limbs and heads of children.
Along with the dull thuds, I hear the shrieks of the terrified
The screams of the wounded, the wails of the orphaned.
Stop it! In the name of God, stop it!! This is madness!!!
Bruce Thompson has been a member of the Palomar U.U. Fellowship for about seven years. He occasionally contributes guest sermons, one of which is currently posted on the Fellowship website. He works as an adjunct librarian and college professor, teaching philosophy and humanities. His poetry has never been formally published, but he has contributed several poems to an online poetry magazine called The Ghazal Page."
Grazing cattle near Wolfe Ranch in Utah
(now Arches National Park)
Out here in eastern Utah the wind blows with
a grim persistence, like an ornery mule.
Me and my hoss git awful tired of it,
and sometimes a feller just needs a break.
So just last year, in eighteen ninety-six,
I went back east and saw the Brooklyn Bridge.
John Augustus Roebling designed the thing,
but died before he saw it built. His son
completed it, and what a sight she was!
From end to end she stretched six thousand feet.
Rising three hundred feet, or so, her towers
were like cathedrals built to honor God.
And that got me to thinkin’ along these lines:
such a wonder took planning and design.
Only an architect can build a bridge.
Well, by golly, my hoss is like a bridge.
He’s got two towers in front and two behind,
and his spine runs suspended like a road between.
Only an architect could build a horse.
I reckon, come Sunday, I’d best be in church.
Now here I sits above Cache Valley Wash,
upon my horse, watchin’ the cattle graze,
while there, against the sky, all red and brown
and bigger than life, is a massive sandstone arch.
“Slim,” says I to the cowpoke at my side.
“How do you reckon a thing like that got there?”
“The wind,” says Slim and turns his collar up.
“It was carved out by this damn persistent wind.”
Carlsbad Caverns
Stay for a spell in silence and darkness
in this chamber charted chiefly by echoes,
aware of its whisperings wrapped in wonder.
This erstwhile crypt for creatures with crusts
expended eons becoming immense:
making miles by amassing molecules,
death by death accruing doggedly
until locked at last in layers of loam.
Then threading through the thickening earth
solvents insinuated themselves slowly
eating the innards of the vast edifice
until, like old teeth attacked by toffee,
the archaic reef was rendered rotten,
fraught with fractures etched in the firmament
that gradually grew into grand caverns
worn away by the wash of acids.
What took
an eon to amass
took an eon to decay;
an age becoming vast,
the same to wash away.
Colliding continents then caused the rising
of that riddled reef above the rain line,
drawing out juices, draining the darkness,
exposing its emptiness to the ingress of air.
Finally filtering through the fissures
droplets of dew decorated the darkness,
carrying calcite in beads that clung
like bats below the broken ceiling,
leaving latent layers of mineral,
depositing draperies drop by drop,
forming fragile stalactite forests,
stately stalagmites like stone saguaro,
and gaudy gardens of glistening crystal:
fripperies formed from the finest of films.
So wait for a while inhaling the wonder,
learning the lessons limitless time.
This place
was made by no great god.
This prodigal wonderland
was made by a little god
with too much time on his hands.
Crescendo
(overlooking the Pacific Ocean from the grounds of the San Dieguito U. U. Fellowship)
See how the ear-shaped shore becomes a harp,
and the rows and rows of white-capped waves its strings;
listen as the fingers of salt-soft breeze
pluck out a rippling arpeggio of light.
We stand on rampart cliffs above the escarp,
unwilling to withstand what music brings;
and, like the troops of Jericho, are seized
by a kind of joy that puts our souls to flight.
I am a pained harmonic, slightly sharp;
I am ears, hearing everything that sings;
I am the song itself; or, if you please,
the song is all. It reaches such a height—
so swelling a crescendo—I am brought
to where God is...and where I am not.
O wise laundress
I met a woman at the laundromat,
who said— “There’s quietude in folding clothes.
A menial task; but not as bad as that.
It gives me time to think. Sometimes I pause
and wonder why it matters that sheets be flat,
or stockings matched and rolled. It does, of course.
Nothing in ten thousand years has mattered more.
Without fresh clothes, life is squalor and remorse.
Women’s work!—the end never realized;
yet, rest assured: to carry on this chore,
generations of new daughters will be raised.
When I reach Heaven, what wonders will it hold?
No one can tell, but I’ll be much amazed
if, even there, there are not clothes to fold.
Diapers
Professor Pluchik, working in his lab
upon elixirs that would lengthen life,
was unaware that near the wall his wife
had tossed soiled diapers and a box of Fab.
Nor did he know how volatile his mix
would be, left unattended on the flame
while he and Walter idly played a game
of chess, and shared their views on politics.
The test tube shattered, splattering the room;
and plumes of smoke, as venomous as vipers,
billowed forth in nacreous phosphate fumes.
Now, for the human race, destruction looms:
attacked by ghoulish, animated diapers
intent on bringing disarray and doom!
Laundry: A Country-Western Sonnet
This here’s the last time that I’ll wash your shirts,
‘cause laundry make me think how much it hurts.
We tried to act like children playing house,
but it was always just beyond our reach.
You can’t wash rayon blend in liquid bleach;
and now I feel as faded as this blouse;
and, even though I swore to be your wife,
well, baby, even socks don’t mate for life.
We don’t discuss our problems when they’re small,
but leave them where they are to itch and fester;
and doing laundry leads me to recall,
you can’t mix cotton in with polyester;
and I know I swore to stay through storm and strife,
but, honey, even socks don’t mate for life.
(A song performed by a Denver folk group, The Mother Folkers - the most carefully pronounced name in show business.)
The Housewife’s Lament
One day I was walking and heard a complaining
and spied an old woman, the picture of gloom.
She gazed at the mud on her doorstep (t’was raining),
and this was her song as she wielded her broom.
CHORUS:
Oh, life is a toil and love is a trouble.
Beauty will fade and riches will flee.
Pleasures, they dwindle, and prices, they double,
and nothing is as I would wish it to be.
There’s too much of worriment goes in a bonnet;
there’s too much of ironing goes in a shirt.
There’s nothing that pays for the time you waste on it;
there’s nothing that lasts us but trouble and dirt.
In March it is mud; it is slush in December.
The mid-summer breezes are loaded with dust.
In all the leaves litter in muddy September,
the wallpaper rots and the candlesticks rust.
CHORUS:
Oh, life is a toil and love is a trouble.
Beauty will fade and riches will flee.
Pleasures, they dwindle, and prices, they double,
and nothing is as I would wish it to be.
There’s worms in the cherries and slugs on the roses,
and ants in the sugar, and mice in the pies.
The rubbish of spiders no mortal supposes,
and ravishing roaches and damaging flies.
With grease and with grime from corner to center,
forever at war and forever alert,
no rest for a day lest the enemy enter,
I spend my whole life in a struggle with dirt.
CHORUS:
Oh, life is a toil and love is a trouble.
Beauty will fade and riches will flee.
Pleasures, they dwindle, and prices, they double,
and nothing is as I would wish it to be.
Last night in my dreams I was stationed forever
on a far little rock in the midst of the sea.
My one chance in life was a ceaseless endeavor
to sweep off the waves as they swept over me.
Alas, ‘twas no dream. Ahead I behold it.
I see I am helpless my fate to avert.
She laid down her broom, her apron she folded.
She laid down and died, and was buried in.....dirt.
CHORUS:
Oh, life is a toil and love is a trouble.
Beauty will fade and riches will flee.
Pleasures, they dwindle, and prices, they double,
and nothing is as I would wish it to be.