How… 5 poems | Linda Chown

Bigots have not spigots

Bigots have no spigots of charity
They burn bias with threaded needles 
As a way of catching and trapping us
God save all our souls from this evil contamination 
Of such wickedness and sadness.

Let us stand on the streets together 
Tall and proud
And read poetry with each other 
Hug and love with all our muster
To share a shining nuance of the wonderful 
While this untenable world circumnavigates around 
in crippling blindness

Life Could Be A Weapon for Change

Life could be a weapon for us to change, to live even,
To spread peach plenty about the shade,
To drink frozen oleanders,
To soften the pain of drone death and safe words.
Say your speech to wake us from wanton laziness
When in the near distance 
People implode in pain and panic, 
Sting entrenched pale in pus and puke.
If half the world is jerking like that,
We must not tell ourselves Christmas stories. 
Drink drunken words that crash shields

Let your comfortable life quiver and unsettle.
We may all then might maybe come together 
in a vast epic colloquy, 
as in Odysseus with Telemachus 
two great forces affirming the inchoate shape of
that uncertainly love.

How we face the world

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Whenever tides spun avid 
Wherever it was inevitably dark
Annie sang soft whisper memories, 
of what was said quiet in her parents 
bed.
At first glance she was a small circumference
in others views—
one gentle cell dreaming.

Her mind waters welled
like the tides blood 
and Annie without knowing 
why searched in her gentle blue  
for Caleb a man all strenuous!
he of the mind’s rough face

His voice a rocket to Annie’s
stillness   Sometimes she even 
thought quiet like a night star,  
sometimes calm dreaming 
her intransitive wonders running. 

Caleb he burned too hot for her cool 
she felt in this soft black cave the souls,  
spirits of the balmy present, turning and turning 
Annie could not reach the off switch 
to silence restless Caleb burning. 
She tried turning off that switch
To unwriggle his wrestling
ongoing transitive chaos.

And Annie bless her she said 
I want to slide 
not to possess
to roam not to own 
Red periwinkles and blue hyenas
The best.

Palm Sunday Passover

This great tide of solar beginnings
Growth indivisible—beyond words
Such reawakenings
When we green ourselves
Sun spices everything stronger
A triumphant glare shows you
and her and the world wallows with us
all in now when life wells to a head. 
Plant blooms bloom more
In a plethora of themselves 
A grand annual rejoicing 
When our faith strengthens
In silent joy that all is what it is
That we can be blooming now together.

How I Miss Him on Labor Day

My indomitable father was a man of unseen dreams 
In all his grey garb he looked so gentle
Like a philosopher assembling life drifts.

Life and injustice forced him to get rock taut  
Like those Herbeden’s nodes  
Marking his knuckles so beady.

As a girl, to grow I had to challenge 
That certainty he held so tight 
Fear quiet there in his feeling And between us we gained 
Mutual lifelong soul respect.

He would come to Grand Rapids and 
walk with his beret and cane in the Labor Day parade 
in honor of workers, of you and we, dignity 
and of his daughter, perennially late sleeping me.

Linda Chown…

…is a poet professor musician who now lives in Michigan although her past is coastal and international: Spain and California. Author of four books of poems and finishing her next book, Sunfishing, Linda is a life-long activist, sun-lover and dreamer. She was raised in an activist family from the start. A hopeless romantic, sometimes inequities everywhere drive her to despair and to writing action.

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