Compare & Contrast:
NYC: 09/11/01
London: 09/07/40-05/10/41

Americans under-30 can’t.
They don’t remember the Blitz.

They think we’re unique. We are;
we think History begins & ends

with us.

(10 SEP 11, Santa Clara CA)v2

Dreaming of...

I’m dreaming of

the fluffy white pillows

& white down-filled quilt

of my Polish grandparents' bed

on Forester St. off Salem Common

where as a child I slept away

Sunday afternoons after WW2.

(9 SEP 2011, Santa Clara CA)v2

HUGH FOX

HUGH FOX

(1932-2011)

From 1968, the more

I got to know Hugh,

the more he perplexed:

transvestitism as Connie,

conversion to Judaism,

really only amounted to

ordinary provocations.

Q: What next? I wondered.

A: Death by cancer.

(05 SEP 11, Santa Clara CA)5

BIZ.ARROW WORLD

In today's Biz.arrow World

companies pay top CEOs

to hire bottom workers

who can't buy what

they make; buying less,

economies plunge, CEOs

claiming to be unaware

that Henry Ford sold

Fords to his workers.

(04 SEP 11, Santa Clara CA)v10

My father never taught me how to garden

My father went to Essex Agricultural Institute ('The Aggie') in Danvers MA, but hardly gardened in West Lynn where I grew up (7-21.) He never taught me to garden. Maybe it was because we rented.

But taking me along with him to the cemetary on Mother's Day, he would stop at a florist to buy a flat of hot-house pansies, his mother's favorite annual, to place on the family plot.

After retiring early (62.5) from the Lynn GE River Works, he bought a small house a block from where I'd grown up & gardened in the back yard. I'd moved away by then, & when I visited again, he showed me some Egyptian walking onions with tiny bulbs at the tip of scallion-like stalks.

He still never taught me how to garden, keeping that to himself. He was strangely secretive.
.

Poets, Verging

As a young poet (25) in 1967 I verged at Wind in the Timothy, an 'upcountry' poetry festival held across the road from the old Shaker colony in Canterbury NH. It was mostly anti-war.

I came along with my poetic mentor, Tom Sheehan (Boston College '56) , a pro-war poet who had joined me (Boston College '63) in producing Earthwork/Redoubt a xeroxed 10-pg. pro-/anti-war poetry booklet we sold for 60c (the cost to produce it.) We read it to a mostly-poet audience; amazingly, it sold out.

Biologist Dr. Bob Chute of ME, an anti-war poet & editor we met at the festival soon began publishing both of us in his new 'small-press' mimeo quarterly, The Small Pond of literature.

44 years later, Bob & I exchange our latest poems via internet. Here's his blog: A Poet On the Verge of Science http://scientificpoet.blogspot.com/

Holding an apple in my hand
takes me back over a half-century
to my Massachusetts childhood,
sinking my teeth into Winesaps.

(What did they taste like? I forget.)

Today, I read in the NYT online
that Gravensteins are fading from
California’s winey Sonoma County.

Where are the Winesaps of yesteryear?
Answer: Growing in Virginia.

(01 SEP 11, Santa Clara CA)v6