1940, 1970 and Today – plus other poems - 10. ...at day's end...

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Poem No. 24

Pen and paper,

white-clad forelegs

and the eyes of a poet.

“Not beauty. Not again,” he thought.

“That word comes back

“every time my soul seems stirred;

“Not this time.” He looked up

because he was being looked at.

An average man, a black-double-breast,

turned his eyes away.

“Cute enough,” he thought

and wrote; the first line now

joined by a second, then

by a third.

‘Today the train swells,

the every-bodies and them

placed in seats around . . . ‘

He glanced up. The black-jacket

glanced back, but his eyes,

to the other’s surprise, looked not at him

but what rested on a notebook

there on his thighs.

Pen and paper,

white jeans, shaved head,

he caught me looking at him.

A young man, beautiful, living

on the train that carted all of us,

the far-more dead, back and forth

to our pseudo lives.

“Not beauty, not again,” he thought,

but his song would not be sung

without it. Let me finish it for him.

Poem No. 25

Tanka:

Two boys on bikes are

Calling ‘bye’ out on the street;

Through autumn twilight

Their voices call like waved hands,

Never doubting reunion.

Poem No. 26

Tanka:

An empty mailbox,

A machine that’s unanswered;

These are the hard ones

At day’s end to overcome,

These small everyday sorrows.

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