Breaking Silence

Breaking Silence

By Geoffrey Paul Gordon


Why not speak out
among the silently praying?
Consider the futility of quiet.
This is my thought:
That healing is active,
This is my belief:
That the unspoken is unknown,
This is my hope:
That knowledge is strength.
I remember lives taken,
Lives risked and lost,
Tears shed unashamedly,
The surviving world in an embrace
Like at the end of a long slow dance;
The dancers tired and leaning
On each other for support,
The musicians waiting to pack up,
The dancers clinging and closing their eyes, exhausted,
But wishing for just one more song.

Fix

Fix

By Alicia Suskin Astriker

The puzzled ones, the Americans, go through their lives
Buying what they are told to buy,
Pursuing their love affairs with the automobile,

Baseball and football, romance and beauty,
Enthusiastic as trained seals, going into debt, struggling—
True believers in liberty, and also security,

And of course sex—cheating on each other
For the most part only a little, mostly avoiding violence
Except at a vast blue distance, as between bombsight and earth,

Or on the violent screen, which they adore.
Those who are not Americans think Americans are happy
Because they are so filthy rich, but not so.

They are mostly puzzled and at a loss
As if someone pulled the floor out from under them,
They'd like to believe in God, or something, and they do try.

You can see it in their white faces at the supermarket and the gas station
—Not the immigrant faces, they know what they want,
Not the blacks, whose faces are hurt and proud—

The white faces, lipsticked, shaven, we do try
To keep smiling, for when we're smiling, the whole world
Smiles with us, but we feel we've lost

That loving feeling. Clouds ride by above us,
Rivers flow, toilets work, traffic lights work, barring floods, fires
And earthquakes, houses and streets appear stable

So what is it, this moon-shaped blankness?
What the hell is it? America is perplexed.
We would fix it if we knew what was broken.

Bad News About My Vocation

Bad News About My Vocation
By Ron Koertge

I remember how the upper crust in my hometown
pronounced it- Care-a-mel. Which is correct, I guess,
but to everyone else it was carmel.

Which led to the misconception about the order of
Carmelites.

I imagined they served God by heating sugar
to about 170 C, then adding milk and butter
and vanilla essence while they
listened to the radio.

I thought I could do that. I could wear the white
shirt and pants. I knew I couldn't be good
but I might be a good candy maker.

So imagine my chagrin when I learned about
the vows of poverty and toil enjoined
by these particular friars.

I also crossed off my list the Marshmallowites
and the Applepieites, two other orders
I was thinking of joining.