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
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
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
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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