The padlock is orange with rust

As is the hasp from which it hangs.

This scabulous crusting

Speaks of age

Of many rainy days

And dew-filled nights

Of solitude and sentry.

 

But from the dark keyhole

Nature has ventured forth—

New leaves, tiny Spring leaves

Seeking light, sunshine,

And a freedom

The lock would deny.

 

 

#cheerupthelonelyday

 

When he won his wings

The air force took his photograph

His hair evenly dark

Against the pale background

The pose catching the slow and easy smile

His sister knew so well,

His lips still soft with youth

And the promise of tomorrow

His eyes shining

Like wingtips touched by the sun.

He was so proud

He had won his dream.

 

Was it a year or a little more

Before the next photo came?

The camera recording

His promotion to captain.

Another proud moment.

 

Yet his sister cried when it arrived

For his hair was brushed with gray.

His lips so straight and tightly held,

His eyes dark shadows

That carried no memory

Of joyful, quick laughter.

 

Two photographs side by side

A war in between

Two photographs side by side

Beside them where they sat

His sister’s broken heart

 

 

 

#cameraday

Wind whistles through bone

The flute of the long dead

Music from another time

When lost people danced here

Beside hearths now buried

Beneath the desert sand

 

I imagine I hear their voices

Their songs circling

Within my head

Melting my staid posture

I sway as if blown

By the whistling wind

But in truth, I dance

In this ancient space

 

#globalwindday

The house where he slept is gone—

A barren lot, now, in the dawn.

So where is he,

The child whose memory is haunting me?

 

With his skin, like a turnip left too long

Out of ground in the sun,

The last of twenty-five, born without a song,

Without a place to run,

The hunger shrieked from his eyes,

Despair in his sighs,

In hand-me-downs that never fit,

Never still, ever moving, he would sit.

His fingers nibbled up our treasures

For heroin, pills and acid cures

For brothers, uncles-who-weren’t, and mayhap fathers

Who spilled their deaths into the morning papers.

 

I required him day after day to stay

Till all his stolen prizes on the desktop lay

And day by day his take grew less and less

As though only stolen to confess.

One day escaping when I forgot the game,

He returned, though I did not call his name,

Offering two paper clips and a rubber band:

All of that day’s contraband.

A little praise, a little gentle care

I could easily spare

For hungry eyes and a true smile

That lost for once its former guile.

 

The house where he slept is gone–

A barren lot, now, in the dawn.

So where is he

The child of hungry eyes,

Child refugee

With hungry eyes?

 

#worldinternationalchildrensday