Solstice, equinox,
Nature’s holy-days
Carve seasons into our blemished world.
December twenty-first
And my mortgage—
A poem a week—
Remains unpaid.
I jotted notes
Wrote two titles
Even made a quatrain,
But could not complete
A single verse.
My first remarks
Defined the power
Of unregulated greed—
The fertile seeds
Of revolution—
To crush humanity
Reduce this shining city on a hill
To chaos,
Leaving cold ashes
In its place.
But I’ve tolled that bell
So often that it’s cracked.
“Interest,” I thought,
“An interesting word.”
It’s what you get from lending,
Pay to borrow.
But, significantly,
It’s what makes life bright.
Imagine, if you can,
A life devoid of interests,
Except, perhaps, the meds
Reducing pain;
That’s what lies ahead.
Which, of course, leads to self-interest.
Born to melancholy
And suspicion,
I distrust those
Who seem to want to help.
I find the mission
Of most charities fictitious,
Fraudulent scams,
Enrichment schemes.
My doctor called—
Asked me to come in.
My first thought was
A milking plot
To bilk my Medicare
With fees for services,
Lab tests and the like.
But someone set me straight—
Providers get a capitation fee
And nothing more,
Which made me think
A darkest thought—
How Medicare’s prosperity
Would flourish
If they could introduce
A tiny “de”
In front of my
“Capitation.”
I made my living teaching poetry
Beguiled my students
With the mysteries
Of form, aesthetics, melody.
I’m much older now
And look back with a modicum
Of guilt.
I lectured fervently
On that famous ode
That ends:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
Perhaps some threads
Of truth are woven into beauty.
But to argue that truth
Is beauty just boggles.
I wonder how much beauty
Keats found in the truth
Embodied by the long,
Agonizing illness
That killed him
At the age of twenty-six;
What beauty radiates
From our planet’s history
Of storm, disaster, plague,
And ceaseless war?
Perhaps,
Without a 23.4 degree tilt
In the axis of our Earth,
We might be freed
From the deadly chill
And morbid heat
Gifted by those
Solstices.
(12/21/13)