August feels a little late 
You’d thought that by this latter date 
You’d surely have more done 
The bees are in the asters
The butterflies are rare 
The twilights have a sharper tone 
But still more time for fun 
 
September’s songs are mellow 
You’re not going back to school 
Marigolds are yellow 
And resolution is the rule 
 
October is the month for love 
For leaves that leave you with a flair
You think that they will stay forever 
But leave you, shortly, in despair 
 
November is reflection time 
To slip betimes twixt rain and grime 
But if you’re being truthful 
You’re still feeling in your prime
 
December days come crashing down 
They speak of futures left unsaid 
The leaves are in the gutter
The garden mostly dead 
Yet you take a gulp of frosty air 
And steer for straight ahead 
______ 
*Part one of this verse calendar appeared in Verse-Virtual’s January 2021 issue.
                        

My mother lost two houses 
It wasn’t hard to do 
Two fathers passed away as well
A story sad but likewise true
A story she would later tell 
when things – or so it seemed to us –
were mostly going swell 
 
My mother had two mothers 
Or maybe it was three 
One that was a debutante
And one that learned to cook 
But in all the fates decreed back then 
they gave less than they took 
 
My mother lost two houses 
Will we find them still somewhere?
The first was lost to early death, 
The next to times that proved unfair 
When you think of poor Mom’s childhood 
it takes away the breath
 
She didn’t lose the last one,
though in the end she fled 
‘Twas time that left her lonesome 
Time merely grabbed its share 
And when we cruise down mem’ry’s lane –
Such lovely people living there!
 
Her son, he was a keeper 
He wrapped her in the best of care
We visited from far away,
I never did my share
And though the story had to end
And though the final scenes were spare 
I still recall those missing houses 
They were castles in the air
                        

In the life-giving ecstasies of a Berkshire spring
I am thinking not of lilacs last-blooming
     in the war’s climactic year, 
but of the fall of 1859
when a live-ammo demo at Harpers Ferry exposed 
the American Army as the last defense of slavery:
Blue-coated troops under Lee shutting down a doomed assault 
on the nation’s peculiar institution, 
a rifled protest scornfully denounced in the nation’s press
as ‘treason’ and ‘treachery’
 
Until freethinker Thoreau spoke his “Plea for Captain Brown” 
in Boston’s Tremont Temple, saying, “When a government kills
     the liberators of the slave, 
it reveals itself as merely brute force… 
A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies 
     a million Christs every day!”* 
 
And Emerson weighed in: “He made the gallows 
     as glorious as the cross,”
words setting in motion an apocalyptic purging of 
     centuries of crime
 
And I think also of the elegy by Whitman, who in the midst 
     of war’s infernal nights said of one of the fallen, 
looking old and gray though scarcely more than a boy, 
“I think this face is the face
     of the Christ himself,
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.”**
______ 
*Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” 1859
**Walt Whitman, “A Sight in Camp,” 1862.