A summer poem about my father

Zinnias

I have a photograph from my childhood

of my father, standing in his zinnia garden,

puffed-up and beaming, posing for the camera,

watering hose in hand, surrounded by bursts of color

like blossoms of fireworks he himself lit weeks earlier

in time-lapse, kneeling on the dirt, striking a match

by placing each seed ­underground,  slow fuses

brought to life as white-hot shoots – pushing skyward,

growing green in a thick tapestry of tall arcs, swelling,

opening finally in brilliant explosions of red, yellow, orange – even purple,

to detonate around him like a fourth-of-July celebration

of his skill in gardening them forth into the world:

for a brief moment forever he stands proud,
a pyrotechnic God among flowers.

Phoenixes

Listening to music tonight to drown out the fireworks, I was thinking about the fishing season just under way in Alaska, and found this on the page a few minutes later:

The Clothes They Wore

In my dream tonight

I stood on the deck of a boat

surrounded by ghosts of fishermen

who never returned from the sea.

They walked on water.

All of them rose out of the ocean

dripping, but not wet

and stood there facing me

as if to tell me what I missed.

I didn’t question the logic

of the dream. It was a dream, after all.

Not a nightmare.

But I had to wonder:

all these unnamed drowned,

no monument with a name attached

or standing near the shore

Phoenixes, wings spread cold before me.

No smiles or frowns, nor masks of anguish

on tortured faces. Passive expressions all.

 Not one spoke. They stood in a circle 

around me, my engine at idle.

Waves lapped the side of the boat.

I looked around – all points.

As far as I could see, they were there,

some in oilskins and nor’westers

some in sweatpants and bare feet.

The clothes they wore. I wondered

what would happen if I did not awaken –

if I would join them. It was then,

my t-shirt soaked with salt water, I did.

I am not a religious man, but...

I'm not religious, but a song i was listening to today got me thinking about a woman I often pass on the way to town, and the way so many Christian legislators are attacking women's rights lately. Even though this travels elsewhere, that's where it began. This is what I unpacked:

Mary

What if Mary was indeed the mother of God?

And what if she was standing on the corner

like the woman I passed today, holding the cardboard,

“Kids and I Need Food,” or the one she had last week

“Need $60 for Rent”? Why $60? Was that all it took

to rent a manger? A stable? A twenty-first century stall

lined with straw? How much more did she need for the food?

No, she wasn’t pregnant. But what if that meant

She was already born, an infant in swaddling clothes,

hungry and alone in the bushes behind mother Mary, 

who tucked her out-of-sight for fear of DSHS or worse?

What would happen if the state took away the Child of God

from her loving mother, and put her in the foster system?

What kind of God would that child grow up to be?

And where would that leave us? I wish I could say

I rolled down my window and handed her a dollar.

Or sixty. But I didn’t. I was in a rush to get to the store

before it got too crowded. Too embarrassed to look

another Mother of God in the eye, I pretended to be more

of a conscientious driver than I am, and checked the traffic

hard behind her before pushing the pedal down,

speeding away, echoes of a crying child ebbing behind me.