Norma Sadler
isolena@yahoo.com

Lucy: Lost and Found in Ethiopia


We can celebrate who we are
With our thumbs up.

Ah, that we have thumbs to use. 
It’s the way we began 
With flakes and hand axes
Around fires.
 
In the once upon a time of stories,
The magic of a gathering creates
Dancing diamonds of light 
On walls in old caves far in the past.

Now we go back to ancient times 
On computers. 
We connect right now, 
Right in the exact moment 
Of finishing a sentence. 

We chatter our way with keys, 
And leap into the virtual reality 
Of it all,
Of the desert, of the dig,
Of Lucy, found. 





Old Timers
          
  
The farmhouse siding was dirty, gray, peeling.
On the porch rocker, the old man
Set up a slow rhythm.

The old dog, chained, before him
Rustled through dry leaves.                                    
A shot gun rested near the door.

The old man thought about the money
Buried safe beneath the porch,
Unknown to anyone but him.

The dog limped to his food bowl 
And then back to the old man again.
He growled at a magpie in the tree.

Sometimes the man would forget 
He was alone, and call,
"Martha, Martha, where's my coffee?"
                    
And he'd wait, and nobody came.
"At least I got all this money,
All this money," he said.

The magpie flew up, then dived 
For the dog's dinner.
The dog clanked back to his bowl.

The old man, watching, set to rocking harder.

Just the two of them left,
Guarding all they had.
          



    
The Sixties


The Sixties went with us
Wherever I went 
With my long hair, sandals
Mini dresses
And Granny glasses.

And with my husband, 
The Sixties went too,
In a khaki army jacket,
Moustache, beard and hair
That crept down 
Over his eyebrows.

That’s the way it was
In Madison, Wisconsin
During the Revolution.

But going to Cleveland,
To see  my mother and father,
Perhaps the Sixties 
Should have stayed at home. 

But we arrived to
Hugs and warmth,
Even if my parents 
Didn’t seem pleased 
With the Sixties 
Coming to them.             





Poetry Reading: Milwaukee, 1969


During the Revolution, 
The Big Guns were there
At a small church in Milwaukee.

Sweating, steaming in seven minute stints 
Till so late I can not remember coming home  
To or from a cause.

A celebration of hot bodies, heavy clothes, and Poets.
For the Milwaukee 9, l0 or ll?
Pass the basket.

It must have been a celebration after all,
The church, the chants, the claps, the crowd,
In the inner city, violent.

Cramped together, we sat, quietly in pews 
With Duncan, Creeley, and Bly.
Poems read in the heat
Became shafts of spoken light.

Six years later,
Soldiers, bent and broken,
Flew home from war.
         
That long ago night though,
We walked out into the winter air 
Where words lingered on our skins.

At first, together we were,
Then going our separate ways.
Heading home, tired, and aching
From the war we never fought.





The Lilac


She saw the last bloom of the purple lilac, 
All rusty and shriveled.
She reached way up and snipped it off,
Letting it fall to spongy soil below.

Too few blooms.  A hard winter.
She willed her arthritic hand
To close the pruning shears.
"All done," she mumbled, “All gone.”.
                              
Later, when her daughter came
They laughed until they cried
At her childish expressions, 
"All done, all gone,"  

Draining milk glasses from childhood,
Reaching into jars for cookies not there.  





In The Fifties


I was eight years old
When I placed a penny on the track.
The red and white streetcar swayed by.

Black and white faces mingled,
Heading towards downtown Pittsburgh.
A flash of glass and light.

Through weeds, I hunted.
There!  The penny.

Flattened scarred face of Lincoln.
Flipped over, the Memorial worn down.

Way before Selma,
I balanced another penny
On the track.