Recalling What Is Essential

Happy NaPo, everybody!

List of Poems
1. How Quick: A Haiku.
2. Some Kind of a Resolution*
3. Descendants
4. Quarantine*
5. Sentimental Value





*COVID-related

How quick coffee cools!
Can't humanity fix that?
Why haven't we yet?

Some Kind of a Resolution

I have a friend who hates sad endings. Who managed to convince himself even Anne Frank had lived, her diary ending happy.
I have a friend with a distaste for happy endings. Who protests for realism and loose ends.
I don't know what to think. Maybe because I so rarely believe an ending. There is always epilogues, sequels, fan fiction. Even now, as college is cut two months too short, I leave, waving a quick see-you-soon, promising every acquaintance a visitation when I return for my furniture. Lunch dates and coffee dates and dinner dates and yet more coffee dates.
I leave with visions of making the five hour drive in the fall for a farmer's market I could barely be bothered for at twelve minutes' distance.
I leave with beautiful fictions of me returning in three, four years, finding everyone still here and unchanged, picking up where we left off.
I leave disbelieving I am leaving.
I don't know what the point is here, what it is I'm trying to say (but you know, that's okay, I can always revise these final lines, add on something more poignant and wise) Maybe I think a story should end with a ride into sunset. All I can manage is to trip over my own tongue. The time's not right to say goodbye. The time's never right to say goodbye. Maybe next time.

Descendants

I believe the first poems were battle cries--
some without words, yet the meaning held the same:
Hear me.
Feel my fear.
Feel it as your own.
In its folded echo
ringing through history,
miraculously,
we have found more than fear to share.
And now, in every psalm, lyric, haiku,
I hear our own battle chants:
Hear me.
Feel mine.
Feel it as your own.

Quarantine

Deleted for use elsewhere.

and sentimental value is a non-transferable coupon
to a store that closed three years ago,
and my closets are overflowing with--
I'm fairly choking with--
and I guess it was a little shocking you didn't remember
that one time on that one walk after you--
but that's a long song
and I'm the only one who wants to hear it--
what I'm trying to ask is how are none
of our yesterdays the same

Wow, I adore that last poem T! <3

what I'm trying to ask is how are none
of our yesterdays the same

great concept & execution. I'm enjoying every one of your poems.