Why run aground on life’s little shallows?

Dying prematurely to meet a lousy deadline.

It’s all a gift and when I go to the gallows

Will I, hand on heart, say I read that sign

Bent by the roadside all the life down?

Did I for a moment take my eyes off the road?

Pull over for a breather, see the leaves turn brown?

Break my routine, watch the elements corrode

Everything around me that was once pristine?

Did I down tools for just long enough

To peer through the gloaming at the fading green?

See diamonds gleaming in the rough?

 

 

Convinced she would veer off and miss yet again,

Big Easy rolled into the heat of the night,

But tropical tempest did show no refrain,

The eye got the old town right in its sight.

 

And so it begins, the aftermath,

Black tide mark of unwanted children,

They pulled the plug on an overflowing bath,

Sat back and watched in disaffected sin.

 

White flight, black plight,

Wasn’t that the point of Lincoln’s long fight?

In the old French quarter it’s all plus ca change,

In the human hell of the dome a tear-soaked sponge,

 

Of poor souls screaming for a little bit of sense,

‘Where’s your priorities lie in this nation’s defense?’

You can deploy with alacrity all the way to Baghdad,

To your own southern comfort you moved not a tad.

 

Man builds cardboard ramparts and casts them in stone,

Is property of the land yet calls it his own,

Runs little circles through the sand of the shore,

Sees not fragile tenancy under his floor.

 

A broiling gulf that storm she exposed,

Whipped up old enmities in a nation disposed,

To dress all its wounds in star-spangled banners,

This hard wind and rain will test southern manners.

(©SMS2006)

 

 

Beyond swaying palms of freedom’s psalms,

Lies a restless ocean of myth devotion,

There on the Maghreb shore divinity more,

Whipped Sahel sands of Mohammedan hands.

 

Sea red, then dead, then none at all,

Between the rivers mountains tall,

Pantheistic plain all are small.

 

And on northeasterly, high plateau Ohm,

Far, far behind Hebrew shalom,

You’ll find the saffron in the snow,

Born of sufferance, a life of know,

Onward yellow stream, confusion reigning,

Twixt Marxist dogma and Confucius saying.

 

Destination microchip men,

Spring cherry blossom,

Land of the rising Zen.

 

Southward Cook he did espy,

Outback orange, Maori black, blue Pacific eye,

Which brings us back to new world gold,

Where Cortez the Killer watched the Aztec fold.

 

The shores on which we did not land,

Are those which had the greatest hand,

Of shaping Earth to their own end,

Still gaping wounds they cannot tend.                                      (©SMS2008)