"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
This entry was posted on 11/25/2009 3:10 PM and is filed under GLBT, Great Poems Online.
My husband and I have just returned from the Soulforce Anti-Heterosexism Conference in West Palm Beach, where we met some of our favorite bloggers, heard a fantastic sermon by Rev. Deborah Johnson of Inner Light Ministries, and felt completely welcome as the token straight couple. I'll be posting a complete report here after the holidays. Meanwhile, enjoy this poem from The Poet Spiel, whose new book is forthcoming from March Street Press in 2010.
Odds
Flesh-hued cotton panties over their heads, covering their ears and topped off by orange and green party hats from that carousing in 1944 on army leave in Paris where they were rightfully thrilled at the revelation of one another in dark shadows.
Now these two old men are fixtures faded as wallpaper, unable to recall why panties and hats had been so hilarious in their steamy bathroom mirror one way-back-when drunken night; only that the panties keep their ears warm, reason enough.
They piddle their aches from threadbare tapestried chairs, facing so their feet meet to keep track of each other; each half-deaf, fearing he cannot hear the other breathe. Yet they also fear dead silence, so they kill it with classic vinyl,
spinning I get no kick from cocaine. But it's not the lyric that lulls their hearts, it's the familiarity of old tunes; how they used to hug-dance in their lard-laden kitchen, brittle Woolworth's shades drawn down against a world
that might not tolerate two such battle-weary soldiers, peacefully withdrawn. Alone, together: Edward crocheting dainty doilies to keep his knotted knuckles nimble, Rodney knitting acres of the cutest afghans for those virile young boys in Iraq.
Long ago, they had to abandon thoughts of ever going back home, just tucked them away in their root cellar to gather fungus and mouse turds, but they agree noises rise from there, like sharp cracklings of their battalion on the front lines of The Big War.
