Verse Of The Month
by Alphie McCourt
Lynnie's Song
February 2012
We said we would leave it to time
Life doesn't give any reason or rhyme
Surely we would meet again
Along the river or out on the plain
Sure as morning brings daylight
Through miles, through years
We would never lose sight
We'd keep faith and it would bring us through
You to me and me to you
'Twould be like heaven, almost heaven
Perfect blend, light , color and sound
Perfect end and a new beginning
Life made sweet, complete and round.
With you, alone, I yearn to go
To a place where sparkle rivers flow
Endless miles of windswayed wheat
Where land and deep blue sky do meet
And in a noontime sungold, glowing
Touch balming fingers to your tender soul
By cool pendant moon in a field of stars
To kiss, to heal, your psychic scars.
'Twould be like heaven, almost heaven
Perfect blend, light color and sound
Perfect end and a new beginning
Life made sweet, complete and round.
Green and yellow, gold and blue
Health and friendship and riches too
Harmony and love, forever joined
You and I, in body and mind
You and I, in body and mind
Evening Star
January 2012
There he stood, sucking in on his ever-burgeoning belly
Abashed and holding in, on a pound or two of jelly
So thrilled to be seating. by far
The evening's shiningest star.
First she smiled as she stepped before tilting her chin
Then to his chargrin
(Just like Jolie or Turner or Hedi Lamar
Mythical names these, all verging on fable)
She politely declined, said no to a table
And sashayed her sweet ass right up to the bar.
Love and To Be
December 2011
Love we learn from our fathers,
To hope for love in a soon and someday perfect world:
Our women teach us how to brave it,
Whatever we are to be.
Children Die of Malnitrition!
November 2011
"But, Dear Sir, that's not my mission
The business that I do, they say,
Will benefit each one.
Someday."
Time and a picture
October 2011
Each one of us a canvas on which Life paints a picture?
Or do we paint our own?
Either way the paint dries fast.
Wise men exhort us to take our time:
Look up, look down, look all around.
For when God made time he made plenty of it, they add.
Did God make Man to murder time?
If so, how readily we've embraced the task.
For, the more precise Man's measurement,
the more time seems to shrink.
Why not take a break from our watchful stance:
for once, belay the ticking of the clock.
Sit, for a while and taste our thoughts.
Time doesn't need our help: time will surely pass,
and in the softest of slippers.
Take a moment to enjoy the reverie.
Just hurry up and do it.
The Promise of the Leaves
After September 11th
Today, the leaves fall.
Last week, last year, or was it yesterday, the towers
Taking, in their thousands, our sisters and our brothers
All tumbled into crush and burn
To ache, forever, in the shifting gravel pit of memory.
Leaves fall.
Some are speckled yellow, the few, a misty memory, still green.
Just as the red sun, at setting, will conjoin light and dark,
Russet rules now, bridging our slow passage, from summer into Fall.
For the missing, death is presumed, leaving none to be buried.
Mourning will be forever, forever without limit.
Wonder is that the leaves don't flee
Massing up to plaster closed the sky
To shield from sun and light the shame of all mankind,
Disgraced before the gods,
The gods of anybody's race, or faith
But falling leaves won't fly.
Their nature, patient, is to wait and nourish
While the sun, slanting his long farewell,
Sails slow and sure on winter's pledge
That yes, oh yes, the promised spring will come.
Move Along, Please
After September 11th
Street corner poets proffer sheets of rain to the unwashed.
Sparse are the words; spare is the frame
And deep is the pit at Ground Zero,
Deep enough for the never found
And for the twenty million Soviets dead in World War Two,
Or was it forty million?
With room and to spare for our city's homeless children,
Are they ten, or twenty, one hundred thousand, maybe?
Sheltered, they say, but still sent hungry to their beds.
"Spectacle rules", I said. "Sensation conquers all.
When our past is consumed by the little screen
And our future, by the virtual, stolen,
Then, surely, Gravitas is dead
And Tragedy become mere backdrop to performance."
"Move along", said the man, "that's more than enough.
There's no wallowing allowed, no wimping here.
Stand up and smile now. Learn to laugh again, and dance
For only love and laughter can slow the maniac's pursuit,
Constrain his brothers-in-hate, whoever they may be
And stay the zealot's bloodstained hands
In all their dreadful slaughter."
The Shrinks of August
August 2011
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Was Eve really created from Adam’s rib
Or from his backbone, as some, in these changing times, insist?
“August is a wicked month” said Edna O’Brien
And a month well suited to reflection.
Some of us stay in the city, hardy New Yorkers that we are, or foolhardy.
We’ve passed through the build up of June and July
And now we will cope, as well as we can,
With the climbing twindexes of heat and humidity.
Restaurant reservations are easy to come by,
Theater tickets? A cinch, in August.
That’s what we tell each other.
We never go, of course. It’s too hot to stir
Easier to lie to one another, each of us a city sage, all of us nodding in assent.
The chicken and the egg, Eve and Adam’s rib, vexing questions are these
And August poses one more, which we languidly debate.
It’s the doctors’ diaspora that spurs the question.
The good doctors, psychiatrists all; do they hie themselves
To mountaintop and seashore, by air, by road and rail
To escape the dreaded angst of August, and their patients,
Each patient with his own index, all of them on a plunging gauge?
Or is it that their patients, abandoned by their doctors' flight
And left, bereft of even the comfort of the couch
Are driven to the edge, by the absence of the shrinks, and drift toward the rails?
Happily, it doesn't last.
Soon, September comes and the shrinks are back in town.
Patients reenter routine’s cocoon.
Tickets and reservations, much to our relief, become predictably impossible.
Whoever He, or She, may be, is back from the beach
And for a little while longer, we are absolved of care.
Play will resume. Soon enough.
Freedom
July 2011
Feed our children, teach them
And make sure they all have shoes,
Then we're free, to go and save the world
The Prose Nose
June 2011
Once was a man who worked in a bar
Though he hadn’t quite given up on finding his star.
He wrote notes and bits of quotes on cocktail napkins and on scraps of paper.
Sometimes he handed them round, for he enjoyed the caper.
Saved them in his pocket, some day to be enshrined in type.
For, secretly, he craved the hype.
Until, one day, came a sneeze most urgent
An almighty sneeze, immediate and incipient
Made him plunder his pocket, for a tissue convenient.
Posterity lost.
Well, that’s how it goes.
For he stoppered the sneeze
With deathless prose.