April 2022
Bio Note: I resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. I've had over three hundred stories and poems published so far, and six books. I work the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where I sit on the review board and manage a posse of nine review editors.
For ____________
The measure of a life
isn’t length or wealth
or power or success,
it’s the brush strokes
we gave to others.
The nurture and the help,
the small kindnesses,
the mercy and forgiving
we painted onto others
in strokes big and little.
For when we have gone,
all we have left behind
is a self-portrait composed of
the lives of those we’ve touched
with the colors of our being.
______________ has left us a masterpiece.
The Proof
I was I think the youngest
high school sophomore,
pimply, poor and shy.
Classes were undemanding
and I rarely did homework,
but geometry proved annoying.
The teacher used a ruse
to encourage mathematic focus,
offering to give a course ‘A’
to any student who could prove
the hinky problem she presented.
My salvation was clear.
I worked on the problem at home,
getting nowhere until, while bathtubbing,
solution floated up from the dirty suds.
I jumped out of the tub, dripping
and naked, ran to my notepad
and wrote down the steps.
The teacher approved my proof
and gave me the course ‘A,”
allowing me to mentally malinger
for the rest of the semester.
Never since have I been able
to reengage that acuity.
Wet or dry, naked or clothed,
advanced algebra and calculus
give me logic constipations
that haunt me into dotage.
But I had my shining, unknown
moment to rival Archimedes.
©2022 Ed Ahern
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