Casual Encounter

We rode down the elevator together,

I standing and he in a wheelchair.

As we got off, I asked if I could wheel him.

He declined with thanks. 

As we moved down the hallway together,

 I noticed his right foot had been 

amputated and his left leg badly swollen.

He was a diabetic and said

'I will get through this because I must.

My disabled sister needs me.

I wish you could meet her; she's so wonderful.'

He turned the corner toward physical therapy.

I had my own session there earlier.

My pain felt like a benediction for

an angel had crossed my path.

April Dusk by Patrick Kavanagh

It is tragic to be a poet now
And not a lover
Paradised under the mutest bough.

I look through my window and see
The ghost of life flitting bat-winged.
O I am as old as a sage can even be,
O I am as lonely as the first fool kinged.

The horse in his stall turns away
From the hay-filled manger, dreaming of grass
Soft and cool in hollows. Does he neigh
Jealousy-words for John MacGuigan's ass
That never was civilised in stall or trace.

An unmusical ploughboy whistles down the lane
Not worried at all about the fate of Europe.
While I sit here feeling the subtle pain
Of one whose Tree of God has been uprooted. 
Note: I have just discovered the poetry of a native Irishman, Patrick Kavanagh.  He was a farmer for many years and a self-taught poet.  In the last years of his life he taught at University College Dublin.  He died in 1967.  His poetry has an unmistakeable lyric quality which I love.

Premature Blooms, a Tanka

falling petals from
early blooming cherry tree
floating like snow flakes 
upon the warm earth beneath
afflictions of age thwarted

City Echoes

 I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
some suffer so much, I recall the  experience sweet and sad...
                                     --Walt Whitman, "The Wound Dresser"

On a brilliant spring morning,
Union Army soldiers and sailors march
across the old Pension Building
with caissons, horses, even long boats.
A general in full military regalia, astride his horse,
leads his command, raised and life-like,
around the frieze-- 
implacable, ever marching.

Where are the dead and wounded here?
At the Dupont Circle station across town,
Walt Whitman's words, incised
in stone, speak for them.

On a winter's night, a lone man
kneels by a legless soldier's cot,
one of many he will visit.
He moves among them 
washing and dressing wounds, writing letters,
speaking softly, his touch gentle.
He sits with the dead through the long night,
bearing witness.

I recall his words, filled with sorrow
for the young men who tasted life
so briefly.
The general orders his men to charge 
into a hell of fear, agony, and death, 
a scene that repeats untold times
like the perpetual marchers on the frieze.

Note: this poem was previously titled Echoes.  It received further revision in May and was recently submitted to the Baltimore Review.