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Davies, Anderson and Clark

At the Hospital Entrance

by ROBERT A. DAVIES

 

The chunky dark haired man

old from work and worry

how to live on next to nothing

sits by a tiny dog

caresses it, whispers

Mi preciosa!

smiles sweetly.

 

He sits outside the hospital entrance.

His wife is dying

as he waits to hear

whether she has days or months to live.

 

This patient dog is all he will have

and that is something.

He will have bills,

they can confiscate nothing more

the bankers and other big-time criminals.

 

Maybe he will find that pot of gold

at the edge of the  American horizon

find the city housing they promised

and, yes, the social security check.

If he can’t take the dog he will live in the forest.

For years he has seen others,

wondered how they came to that.

 

Robert A. Davies lives in Portland, Oregon. He can be reached at rjdavies3@comcast.net.

 

 

Hung Out to Dry

by KEMMER ANDERSON

 

I hang out laundry on the line to dry.

Women at Damascus Gate sell clothes pins.

At home the unmatched sock distorts the eye.

 

Spread-winged hawks spy our chickens from the sky.

Their binocular eye needs no man’s lens.

The laundry on the line may now be dry.

 

Hungry red shouldered hawks begin their cry.

Rooster and chickens scatter through their pens.

At Homs artillery distorts the eye.

 

Olive skin children clothed in shrapnel die.

Russian tanks clank out martial disciplines.

The doctors need towels and sheets to dry

 

Up blood, cover wounds, expose a sad lie

How tyrants grip their power in lions’ dens

And growl out orders that distort the eye.

 

Through undivided air MIG’s dive and fly

On targets picked by a rule of villains

Who hang out their country to dry and die

With suicide bombs that distort the eye.

 

Kemmer Anderson can be reached at kanderso@mccallie.org.

 

The Death of Shelley

by MAXWELL CLARK

            “for ecstacy is a kind of death.”

–W.B. Yeats, The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry

 

Death, life, death,

Death alive, and dead

Life in death,

Death in life, in living

Deathly, and alive,

But for death,

Its own death, dying

For life,

Of life dying, dying

As death,

So life lives, alive,

Because dying,
To live,

Dying, to die,

Dying to death,
Too dead

To be death, as

Too alive, life dies,

So too life,

After life, after life,

Lives alone, alone living,

Life to life, life as life,

Dead to death.

Maxwell Clark is a poet, musician and painter living life alive in New Haven, CT, USA.

 

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