A Change of Seasons
It is time for a new view of the seasons in my life.
As I get older and my hair turns gray and my bones crack,
I get older with the passing of the seasons.
Looking forward to spring as the winter snows cover my balding head,
Finding refuge in the room with the fireplace burning the coal of yesterday,
It was warm in that room with the one book and one chair.
It was only yesterday that I rode my tricycle and flow down the hill,
Alas, yesterday with all its promised tomorrows,
Yesterday with all its promises of a better life,
And the seasons change and I grow too old to care.
My Parents
This spring I noticed my father moving a little slower than what I remembered of him,
He was a little easier to talk to than when I was young.
My mother, on the other hand, had silver gray hair and was smaller than I remembered,
Only the winter winds had not changed.
As the snow fell from the open skies,
I recalled the time I fell down and bruised my forehead,
She kissed it and it felt better,
While my father stood near and smiled.
The Visit
Flight 714 is now departing for Vermont.
It was time to fly home from a long year of travel in my new town,
A year in which I found my love of my hometown and the people in it,
A time when everything seemed old to me, but in a new way,
If that make any sense of life.
Life had turned me into an accomplished poet,
A writer of love poems but not of life;
And it happened one evening when, as the folded paper lay on the kitchen table,
It occurred to me that my parents always read the evening paper at the kitchen table.
Dark Days
After Nikki-Rosa by Nikki Giovanni
Being black moving in and out of life as I sit in my prison cell,
Recalling the days of childhood remembrance of something good in my life,
My mother’s singing hymns about Jesus and my father, well he was never there.
My first date with a prostitute and my last day of freedom,
Before being locked up in a 6×8 room with a toilet and a sink,
Where I have been for the last 20 years in this 6×8 room wishing to see my mother
Once more time before she goes to heaven, and I’m left in this room with a toilet.
I’m not Lonely
(after Nikki Giovanni)
You would think that I was lonely when I speak to you about my life,
When I cry into my pillow,
Or cook a hotdog with mustard and ketchup.
A newspaper on the dining room table,
And a rocking chair without a dog sitting by it,
You would think that I’m lonely, but I have my thoughts of my childhood keeping me company.
Choices
(after Nikki Giovanni’s Choices)
For Vencinza
You act as if I had a choice to be put away in that mental hospital with its padded room,
And five point restraints,
As if I had a choice to not go insane with thoughts of childhood and my mother leaving me,
No, I had no choices to escape the thoughts of the past,
Now I choose not to be locked up on that unit
With it ECT treatments and anti-depressants,
All of those cameras watching me 24/7,
Nurses wearing those white dresses and white hats and stockings
Conversations with strange women and men,
No, I do have a choice to be sane now that you are in my life.
Wishes
I have a wish to become one of America’s distinguished poets,
Winning awards like poet laureate of Vermont,
Wishes to be able to write new and exciting poems that captures the imagination
Of life in America.
Writing poems that touch the heart of my soul,
I wish to become a writer of the soul of man,
That essence of God’s grace.
Where are They
My old classmates and poets of yesterday—
It seems that they have all but disappeared in that black hole,
Never to be heard from again.
Yesterday’s thoughts about what they wanted to be in the brightness of today,
They are winners of touch football and the poet laureate of 2015.
Somewhere in their lives they remember yesterday as I do.
Negro Mother
(after Langston Hughes)
I forgot my negro black mother,
She was half-Cherokee and half Negro,
At the ironing broad day after day,
Ironing the sheets and undergarments,
She stood there in the winter and summer,
But not in the fall or spring,
Those were the times when she packed the boxes of clothes.
And listened to the AM radio with its gospels and hymns.,
Now I sit at the kitchen table with my white adopted mother thinking back to the days of
My black mother.
Cross
(after Langston Hughes)
It is the cross I carry of being raised in a black family
With a loving a white mother.
It is the cross of mixed feelings of love and despair on my part.
My black mother needed to be hard on me to teach me to survive,
While my white mother gives me hugs to make me strong.
It is the cross of being a black boy in a white world,
A world in which I find myself and having lost my hate of
America.
My father is also white that I share my world with,
Never having seen my black father to have that conversation about race.
I have lost my hate for my black father as I speak my heart to my white father.
In America.
America gives me my freedom, but not my hopes for a black family.
But I love my white family which brings me a cross to bear in America.