Presence
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
The past is never past, is more than ghost
Or Undead creature. Passed away the past
Is not. It lives within. Its whispered boast
Inhabits mental DNA, a vast
Irradiation-like ancestral glow.
It lingers inward and outside our brains
And hearts and souls. It oozes like the flow
Of magnetism on iron fillings. Stains
Of human pasts are like angelic plaques
Inside our ventricles and veins. The soul
Is not complete until it has the cracks
Required to let the past make humans whole.
Our predecessors do not die. They live
In us and hover. They do not forgive.
Helen, Woodrow, and Wilma in Brevard County . . . the Past is Snowbound
The past is living. It has never died.
My mother lives inside me as I cook.
It may not be full-blooded, more like shrunk dried
Rose petals pressed in pages of a book,
Or silica gel surrounding pink whole
Rose blossoms set aside inside a tin
In Florida’s lost summer, or a scroll
Of poetry made up of words now thin,
Thin, thin, my father’s tongue was wont to love
As he declaimed them in the sultry air
About the Pilgrim coast, or clouds above
New England in a blizzard like a blare.
..The past is living in Aunt Wilma’s song
….Resounding from a pulpit now gone long.