Blinded
There are thoughts I keep mostly to myself,
the way day and night mind their own business.
Would it surprise you to learn
how easily my mind can be
turned round by flesh?
I once moved my life across three state lines,
as purposefully as a bird being
lured by migration’s silent
bell, to live with a woman
I did not know, but for the charm
of her nakedness taking
wing on a song or slant of light
that blinded me with too much sight.
Light *
on holding my first grandchild for the first time on Fathers’ Day
I hold you as if handed an egg
but what broke between us was light
the light that rides the rail
that sets all life in motion
between two stations
What more might
might be asked of a moment
* Appeared in October Light Magazine and Now in Contest (Fernwood Press, 2023)
More Light *
I like the days that follow easy
as ceiling fan blades, guiding warm air
into gravity’s arms, and that way
we find and turn each other. Days when,
though I’d welcome company, I’m content
as a heron alone on a log,
one leg tucked up while meditating
over a pond of fish and summer wine.
At any moment, that heron might
slowly unfold its miracle
of flight, and stir the hypnotic tide
of quiet surrounding us, until
all we want is what Goethe called
for with his dying breath “More light.”
* Appeared in Vox Populi and Now in Contest (Fernwood Press, 2023)
Hollowed Out by Fire
I would not wish to be that grey heron
braced against the cold on Prospect Park Lake,
this morning. But for its long taper of beak and stilt-
like legs, it’s hunched under the massive blanket of its wings.
Nearby, the homeless vets I call brothers,
live huddled in their still unmoored lives.
Hollowed out by fire, their hearts and minds keep
tripping wires beside water’s steady lap.
I don’t know how I found so sound a sail
and healing wind, or how that out-of-season
heron failed to follow its flock under
guiding stars to the sun’s warm rise and set.
How do any of us ever find our way?
Dear Walt Whitman,
My granddaughter manipulates trucks and dolls
and farm animals in and out of conflicts
at my feet, as I read your poetry aloud.
You said that all poets are writing just one,
long poem, just as all the hairs on your face
composed your young and old man beards, and all
the lifetimes of all the lonely men, women
and children you loved into your America,
are just one hopeful daguerreotype of eternity.
And I assume, all the birds, feeding in flocks
to leave this northern hemisphere on this late
September morning in 2023
comprise just one migration, and that any one
feather falling from that flight assumes all
any autumnal leaf assumes, pirouetting down
colourful as I am in my waning, silver sliver of time.
Putting down your book, I look out a window
and watch children board a yellow school bus,
eager for play before their minds are occupied
for the day, with lessons and tests and thinking
about death – how can they not as they practice
Active Shooter Drills? I look back to see my pre-school
granddaughter, safely singing “Old McDonald,”
and animating each toy animal as their turn comes round.
O Walt Whitman, O captain, my captain, I worry
that the dark gathering close around us is us.
Richard Levine, a retired NYC teacher, is the author of Now in Contest, Selected Poems, Contiguous States, and five chapbooks. An Advisory Editor of BigCityLit.com, he is the recipient of the 2021 Connecticut Poetry Society Award, and was co-editor of “Invasion of Ukraine 2022: Poems.” His poetry has appeared in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry column and can be found on the Poetry Foundation and the American Academy of Poets websites. In addition, his work is archived in LaSalle University’s Special Collections Library. A Vietnam veteran, he recently reviewed “The Best of Medic in the Green Time: Writings from the Vietnam War and its Aftermath,” for American Book Review. website: richardlevine107.com.
