The Fifties

Notes for foreign (or younger) reader.  DDT was an insecticide sprayed to kill mosquitoes; such spraying has since been banned as unhealthy.  Good Humor was the brand name for an ice cream that was sold from trucks back in the 1950s. 

   The Fifties

Polio haunted the public pools
as mushroom clouds darkened our dreams,
but when the DDT truck sprayed the streets
we ran as if we’d heard Good Humor’s call–
flocking around it to play Dracula
lurking in the London fog
while we breathed as deeply
as we would on any other smoke
and laughed at the monsters
of our imagination.

Nomination

I'm not sure the Muse visited me this week, but I did get thinking about well known people with fitting names.  Here are my ruminations.  (Just a couple notes.  Diana Nyad is a long distance swimmer.  Lumiere means light in French, but not in the sense I use it at the end of the poem. It's only a pun in English.)

 Nomination

If character is fate,
can names be destiny?
Was Wordsworth born to be
a poet? Could Diana
Nyad be other than pure
swimmer? And if the Brothers
Lumiere had not invented
the film projector, would they
have written light verse?

The Inconvenience Store

Note for foreign readers (if there are any): A convenience store in the U.S. is one that is open 24 hours a day and stocks things you might want at odd hours.

     The Inconvenience Store

Always closes as you pull in
the parking lot. It’s open twenty-four
hours – but on someone else’s clock.
Even if you succeed in sneaking in,
it’s out of what you want:
ice in August, diapers at midnight,
condoms for that special date -
while what it does have is slightly
off. The milk gone sour, the cheese
suspicious, the newspapers second
rate. It’s merely there to teach
you to be patient, to plan
ahead and to reconsider
what you merely want
and what you really need.

Monday Off: Columbus Day

An occasional poem by an occasional poet.

Monday Off: Columbus Day

                                     In 1492
                                     Columbus sailed the ocean blue

He was not the first to find what was never
lost or discover what was always there
and then mistake it for what was wanted,
maintaining his own Indies till the end.

Nor was he the last to claim ownership
of the prepossessed or give a curse
with the gifts he gave, killing those he greeted
with infections not of their own making.

But he was among the few to divide
time into before and after. Though now reduced
to a school boy rhyme, he still made the old
feel new, the grey Atlantic turning Caribbean blue.

Waiting Room

A second, simpler poem inspired by the same setting as an earlier one.

   Waiting Room

is the space between
hope and what happens,
between fear and fate,
between now and when:
a place for old magazines
full of yesterday’s news
and things it’s too late
to do, while we await
the diagnosis,
the estimate,
the delivery,
the plumber,
the doctor
or whoever will
see us now.