April 2019
Dear Editor: As you've often suggested, I continue to submit my "best poem" to you each month, but to no avail, since you continue to publish it anyway. Is this your attempt to humiliate me further? If so, it's working. I am increasingly discouraged by your lack of standards, taste, and human decency. Publishers of online--and in-print--journals of great distinction have felt justified to reject this one, Raking, quite freely. One wrote, "This is the worst poem I've ever read, if it's a poem at all. Why not try Verse-Virtual?" So, here it is.
Editor's note: Just for that you won't be getting your paycheck this month.
For more tasteless humor and self-humiliation, visit alanwalowitz.com, where you'll learn more about the publication of the useless volume, The Story of the Milkman and other poems, due this spring from Truth Serum Press.
Editor's note: Just for that you won't be getting your paycheck this month.
For more tasteless humor and self-humiliation, visit alanwalowitz.com, where you'll learn more about the publication of the useless volume, The Story of the Milkman and other poems, due this spring from Truth Serum Press.
Raking
Starter home? I venture, as I pass the young fellow raking leaves
shed by the maple and oak and red oak, which lined the street
long before any of us arrived.
Could be a finisher, he laughs--we’ve practiced this before--
as maybe he considers how he’s gonna pay for this tiny Cape
plunked down in what the realtor convinced him
was the best school district on the North Shore.
Then I remark, my way back, nursing an old man’s coffee--
the 99 cent Special from the Mobil On-the-Go,
bitter, black, and tall to last all day--
as he wrestles leaves into a black plastic bag
that’s sure to decompose in some far-off future
even his son, who’s playing in the leaves, will never see.
Back in the day, we used to burn ‘em, I say.
Huh? he replies, looking as if this were a joke
he might have also heard before, and takes a few off the stack,
steals a look left, then right, for the imagined environmental cops
or volunteer fire brigade out to raise money for their fancy new truck.
Then from his pocket he takes a Bic--
and lights an oak leaf, then a maple, then another still
till he has in hand a long-lost autumn fire.
The wind’s blowing my way and I breathe
a bit of my childhood that some days I try to forget.
Smells good, I say, not wanting to let on the places
I’ve just been taken--the fires up and down the streets,
the crackle of leaves still a little wet,
the men, just back from the war,
some somber, some sober, some trying to be,
tending the home-fires now and wondering
what it had all been about, the loss, the hope,
the generation growing inside already tending
the slow-burning fires of mistrust and resentment,
and hardly anyone venturing a reason why.
© 2019 Alan Walowitz
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF