StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XIII, No. III

No gravity, no dark matter, the standard model
Has a few slight holes in its explanations,
But we are so close, the theory of everything
Seems a few short years beyond our grasp, and then
We should know what gave us first light and what,
If anything, remains for us to ken; I suspect, however,
We will find ourselves at the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I watch my church,
The one I once believed,
Drift slowly back into medievalism
Well incensed by testosterone;
Hocus pocus, women are inferior,
The men reinstated at the top of the chain,
Their nights filled with adolescent fears
And tales of bloody Amazons with monstrous teeth
Who devour unwary men too weak to resist them.

George is back in California,
Visiting his mother for what may be the last time,
The best and the worst way to spend a holiday;
I would spend one more with my parents,
Long buried in Saint Mary's in Sacramento
Alongside my grandparents, my aunts and uncles
And various cousins once removed;
The holidays are nothing if not our memories
The longer time goes by until eventually
You alone remain to tell the tales of ancient holidays
Well met and the great feasts shared with family.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (January 2012)

I am tired and full of headache,
Drawn out and evermore cursed
By a bad back getting worse
And my sixty year recovery
From the life sentence
That is polio.

And now that the war is over,
Pack up your babies and bring your old ladies
Tell every mother's daughter and son
That the war is over once more once again
And the new year has just barely begun.

Entering the marketplace in Florence, he opened fire,
Killing Mor Diop and Samb Modou and injuring two others:
These were killings born of racial hatred, as if
An Italian can lay claim to any particular race
-- We are after all often called the niggers of Europe,
If only behind our backs out of earshot.

The shooter, and author of apparently extreme right wing,
After firing randomly into a crowd of black men,
Killed himself, sparing us the poorly performed circus
That is the modern Italian judicial system
-- We do not need to give still another racist fool
A stage on which to spew his daemonological rant.

African vendors shout razzista!, fill the city street,
Joined by signs and chants of solidarity against the
Pervasive culture of hate; the mayor tweets his outrage,
Arguing that one hateful man does not a city make:
The death of two Senegalese can become a seed of hope
That might alter the course of an ancient river.

In Liege, the same day, a lone man opened fired,
Killing four people and injuring at least one hundred,
The day before Norway's killer showed police how he
Struck down seventy-seven one day last July;
The wall is breached, Europe dissolves into tribes,
Rome grows still more distant as you read this.

At the peak of our darkness,
Time Slows Infinitely,
Planes pause in their flight,
Plummet and crash,
Littering the world below
With carbon crisps and
Scattered bits unrecognizable
As family, friends, or lovers.

At the peak of our darkness,
When we find ourselves
Pausing over our cappuccino
To contemplate damp warehouses,
We might find refuge in a bottle
Of Jameson or Maker's Mark,
Calming the coldly ragged sea
That passes for humanity.

At the peak of our darkness,
When the word for world is ocean
We find ourselves afloat on some
Post-modern jagged bark, gazing at
Meaningless words and promises
On our tablets and smart phones
As seabirds circle overhead
To watch the sea engulf us.

Words are Inadequate


My words inadequately convey
The love I have for you,
The dead-reckoning sureness
That the universe intended
That you and I would become us,
Albeit after many separate adventures,
And various blackly comedic missteps
That proved beyond doubt
Our human fallibility,
Not to mention the passage of decades
Of forlorn stumbling before we managed
To make first contact.
But now, here in the center of everything,
We are one for as long as the stars
Above us shine, the rivers around us flow,
And our slowly aging carbon existence
Coherently maintains our integrity.