by Glenn Wright

Boomer

Oh. Okay.  I see how it is.
They’ll park me in the rec room so that they
can talk and laugh and play their reindeer games.
They’ll leave me a glass of lukewarm lemonade
and hustle me down the stairs and out of sight.

If I take a fall, I’m probably going to shatter
like an alabaster vase.  What are they saying?
Even with hearing aids, I can’t understand them.
Their words are soft and purry, like sleepy kittens.
I think they’re asking if I need a blanket.

My children go upstairs, abandoning me
to the mob of grandkids, supposing that having spent
forty years teaching them, I must miss adolescents,
and that, perched on the sofa like a scarecrow,
I’ll keep them out of the wet bar’s liquor cabinet.

I’m trapped in the fourth level of Purgatory,
where slothful spirits work out their salvation.
The cousins stare vacantly at glowing screens,
occasionally giggling and elbowing each other,
or typing short messages to their absent friends.

Maybe they’re messaging others in the room.
They all seem to have taken a vow of silence.
Tables for billiards, ping-pong and air hockey,
a plasma screen TV, and a piano
stand ready to be used.  We need a snake pit.

The youngest, a sweet-faced girl holding a board game,
sits beside me.  What’s her name?  I kiss her head.
We play and talk about her friends at school.
Our topics of conversation soon depleted,
she smiles, skipping away to join the big kids.

I ask if anyone wants to hear some music.
A few of them smile and shake their heads forbearingly.
They are listening to music and TikTok on their AirPods.
I feel a twinge of pity for these children,
who are really more withdrawn from life than me.





Piano Lesson

I know what happened.
I could,
if I wanted to,
relate the events as they occurred.
I just don’t want to.

I know it happened to me.
For a long time I wouldn’t admit that.
I thought if I could ignore it
I wouldn’t feel anything about my piano teacher.
I was wrong about that.

I tried washing it away with alcohol,
which only set the stain more permanently.
I tried confessing it away without
the soap of contrition.  It was never going away,
that cross of ashes marking me on my forehead.

So it became my mirror.
Why did my good God let me get so lost?
How much of what had happened was my fault?
I was eleven years old, but I knew evil
when it touched me.

I had hidden it,
lied about it,
punished myself for it,
tried to find some meaning in it.
Now, at age seventy, I need to let go of it.





Negative Space

Look at it again.
You thought it was un urn,
but now you see two faces.
The secret’s in the spaces.
None of us expects
the arrow in FedEx.
We must be trained to see
that what’s not there is key.

Are we judged by what we get
or by the things that we regret?
We all might be distinguished
by the things we have relinquished.
No matter how we strive
not one of us gets out alive.
At the moment of our death,
God inhales our final breath.





Shahrazad

I spend the days dreading the fall of night, my love,
composing.  Will you condemn or requite my love?

The tales I spin, a rope to climb to one more day,
or to strangle me.  Oh, my God, ignite my love.

I go forth,  like water my knees, like flame my mind,
like a captured bird struggling to take flight, my love.

Your cruelty and passion fight for me, and I
weave both into the tale that I recite, my love.

The falseness of face and words crystallizes me.
I become a splendid gem to delight my love.

Now I am a mirror.  The wickedness of my
deceitful villains shocks you.  Be contrite, my love.

My story done, I, Shahrazad, leave you spent,
no longer harmful.  Now you know my might, my love.





Strandings

A great mystery of nature:
Why have whales stranded themselves and died,
often in huge numbers, for millions of years?
Their deaths are slow and agonizing.
Dried and burned by the sun, suffocated by their weight,
they often drown when the tide covers their blowholes.

Is it a glitch in their navigation system?
Are they tricked by a deflection of the echoes
or magnetic fields guiding them as they swim?
Do they get confused while following their prey
or fleeing a predator into unknown water?
Are they frightened to shore by blasts of shrieking sonar?

Does curiosity lead them to self-destruction?
Could the beachings be deliberate, not accidental?
Do they, in ecstatic frenzy, offer themselves
as sacrifices?  Do they, so he won’t be lonely,
accompany a dying, much-loved elder
seeking his end on land!  Or do they,

with clarity of purpose, simply choose death
as preferable to life?  Is it too anthropomorphic
to suppose that whales feel existential panic?
Do cetaceans share with their human brethren
the genetic taint that leads us to violently murder
ourselves and others for no understandable reason?





Glenn Wright is a retired teacher living in Anchorage, Alaska, with his wife, Dorothy, and their dog, Bethany.  He writes poetry in order to challenge what angers him, to ponder what puzzles him, and to celebrate what delights him.