What's The Hurry? Read online

  Visitors

  At the Writers Club meeting Friday

  George Washington High School

  The stage set with an empty stool for young writers

  The fluorescents off

  I visit my mother,

  Her hair white now,

  Whiter than ever I remembered.

  She barely sees me:

  It’s those thick, thick lenses

  That replaced her cataracts,

  But she senses me.

  Her mouth at first smiles,

  Then breaks,

  And she begins to cry.

  “Old fool,” she says,

  Angry at her own tears.

  “Why are you crying, Lucille?”

  I ask,Aren’t you glad to see me.”

  “I am, I am” she blurts, holding her lips tight, pressing them hard against her teeth.

  “Then why?” I ask again.

  “It’s the kids,” she bleets.

  I knew that answer. “They’re gone.”

  Gone from home she meant,

  None of her house more and

  Never again,

  Except as visitors.

  November 1991

  The Guns of July

  “I am the grass. Let me work.” — Carl Sandburg

  The sheer cliffs above ocean roar

  Near Muir Beach

  Are dotted with gun emplacements,

  Cement and steel-plated half circles

  Buried deeply

  In the rocky sides.

  Giant, tall-stemmed yarrow and cowpen daisy, beach morning glory and

  hedge mustard, blue pod lupine and monkey flower,

  silver phacelin

  Push around them,

  Burrow into the soil that the wind and rain have slowly

  Deposited onto the reinforced roofs.

  An occasional buzzard

  Glides slowly above these empty warnests,

  Searching, wondering.

  In the hollows of these relics,

  Civilians have tagged the back walls with names,

  With a heart and a cross or two, and with sly comments.

  Forlorn after fifty empty years, these gray cement mouths speak not.

  No plaque, marker, or seashore sign reflects a purpose.

  Their builders and the young watchers who manned them do not testify.

  The gulls ignore them

  As do the brown pelicans who flap and then coast single file

  but two feet above the blue waters below this day’s brilliant sky.

  The young men who watched there, big-cased shells at the ready,

  wake up gray, some white.

  Not a few are dead.

  This is good.

  Off across the wide Pacific

  Jungle tangle and roots have consumed the uniforms, the buried and unburied bones,

  Joined together with the salt and seaspray, relentlessly destroy the debris of war,

  Save perhaps a forgotten bulldozer

  Or one large wing from a downed fighter.

  Poppies have flourished for eight decades in the rich blood of Flanders

  The sands of Normandy sparkle in the Channel sun.

  Centuries hence earthquake and the relentless toiling waves will crumble these Muir Beach bastions,

  These warnests,

  These constructs of man’s folly,

  Man’s fear.

  June, July 1994, May 1995

  Valentines or the Lost Poem

  for Lisa

  Many years ago

  Would it be 1969?

  I wrote a poem for you

  Concerning relationships

  And the agony of race.

  You were a kindergart’ner then

  At Raphael Weill

  Your heart song trilled of love

  Your soul song joy

  No one could contain you

  Though Jean dressed you little girl

  And you had to wear the hated shoes

  (Corrective building of the arch)

  Your enthusiam knew no bounds,

  Leaping from our noontime table,

  You’d rush out and slam our door,

  Clatter down hall and out the front door,

  Tear across the lawn

  And linger at the fence

  To talk and smile and yell

  With “my children” as you called them then,

  Borrowing no doubt a teacher’s loving phrase.

  They would greet you as a sister

  One white face among their dozen darker ones.

  Your animation brought them joy,

  Valentines Day was suddenly upon us

  You made one for each and every child

  Replete with one pink or blue candy sweetheart

  Taped carefully on back or front,

  You said their names with relish,

  Adding a detail here or there to enlighten us with character.

  You dragged home that day in tears

  Not your first cry nor our last

  But somehow so unique

  It has stuck with me up ‘til now.

  I put the words down then, I know,

  But that paper got away.

  It went something like this:

  “You were so excited with your clutch of valentines that day

  The buzzer couldn’t bring school to you too soon.

  Off you breezed,

  Shoes thudding down the hall

  Grady Sessions’ party was the most that any child could hope for

  In one lifetime up ‘till then.

  You came home empty-handed,

  Not one valentine in return,

  Tear-streaked,

  Disbelieving

  And so were we, to tell the truth:

  I had pinned my hopes on Martin

  Knew Malcolm had seen it clear

  But these dreams were too abstract back then

  To smooth your bitter way

  Or bridge those troubled waters.

  You paid the price of pasts back then,

  We are paying still today.

  But don’t get me wrong

  Paying is what Americans must do

  Must do Must do again

  Until we get it right.

  undetermined date, first in 1970, February

  Daniel’s Wedding Day

  for Eliot

  It’s Daniel’s wedding day!

  It could just as well have been yours,

  The perfect groom

  In your straight-arrow dress blues

  Parading with your bride

  Through an arch of gleaming Wilkinson steel,

  Your mates stern

  With pride.

  Instead,

  You stare through

  Your 2 x 2 secure window

  Towards the bridge and the little bit of the city

  Visible from the T.I. brig.

  I can only hope you think

  Of the past,

  Of Daniel

  Of your sisters

  Of Jean

  Of the time when you and Dan got excited about a red-tailed hawk,

  Sighted high atop a tree on the cliff above Capitola beach,

  But I can’t do it for you.

  February 1992

  Special Note: If you have liked these small efforts, I ask that you send 13 cents to me

  (PayPal accepts small amounts) or to your favorite charity. Had you been lucky enough

  to live in Brooklyn, N.Y., before the Civil War you could have bought one poem

  from Walt Whitman for a penny. He peddled his poems door to door! Thanks!

  Quentin Baker

 
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