May's Poem of the month

A Note from Wilma Hopkins

It sits at the top of my email in-basket,
a note from Wilma Hopkins
with the enticing subject line
‘Do you love me or not?’

I have never known a Wilma,
excepting the one that Fred Flintstone
bellows for in cartoon Technicolor,
but I don’t think she took on another surname.

And I doubt that this is truly a Hopkins,
or even a woman,
begging me to learn more about
her long-lost desire for fulfillment,

particularly since I don’t even know
what or who I would be fulfilling.

Every fearful synapse in my brain
says to ignore and delete such mail from strangers
since they usually have more devious intent
like spreading electron worms that eat my words.

But how do I resist such an inquiry,
carrying, as I do,
the usual male ego that craves attention
even from ghosts beyond the screen?

To click, or not to click,
that is the impulse,
whether tis nobler
to grasp at a dream of fantasy lust,
or to send Wilma and her erotic spam
to the recycle bin of email ether.

To answer your question, Wilma,
I need to know more, but that becomes the conundrum:
I cannot know more without opening the envelope,
which would then unleash your true identity
and render my answer meaningless –
which is to say, I love you not.

National Poetry Month

April was National Poetry Month. And I missed posting a poem on the last day, as has been my habit since November 2004. Well, to be honest, I posted one and pulled it. So one day late...

Illusion of Snowfall

There is no evidence that the snow has fallen.
I see white flakes randomly careening
across the neighborhood façade,
some of them running sideways with the wind,
the larger ones falling straight down
and creating their own right of way,
ignoring the roller coaster ride of the rest.
White lines are drawn across grey granite and red brick,
cut by cars and trucks that blow through the cold smokescreen,
all in an early April motif out my office window.

But nothing hits the ground.
The oblivious grass shows only the pale green of spring,
and no slick white covers the brown cold sidewalk.
Miles of sky is filled with clouds and wind
dropping its frozen cargo in a last ditch effort of winter
to derail nature’s return to brighter colors.
I can wait it out as the sky swirls with snow,
knowing that for all its effort,
the cold will only be a vestige of the cloud’s illusion
that it can block out the growing sun.

More Coffin

Another excerpt from Letters to a Young Doubter, William Sloan Coffin:

…a sentimentalized Christmas is so much worse than a commercialized one.
The obvious answer is that the latter never pretends to be anything else. Sentimentality, however, does not arise from the truth; it’s what’s poured on top, blurring and distorting the truth…
Now consider the Christmas crèche. The baby lies in the manger because no one in the inn would make room for a pregnant woman. The ox and the ass are not picturesque guests who just had to come and see; this is their home. The Christmas truth is that he who was to be the bread of life for human beings is laid in the feed box of animals.
At the beginning as at the end of Christ’s life, God comes off wonderfully. We do not. The inhumanity, as we used to say, “of man to man” is exceeded only by man’s inhumanity to God. That’s why I think God is not too hard to believe in, just too good to believe in, we being strangers to such goodness.