A Difficult Cadence to Maintain

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Limbo of Infants

November is forever falling leaves
As long as I can remember
The scattered piles of the day’s labor
Undone by the icy wind
Whispering words of childhood names:
Rover, Polo, Oxen free.
Of all the seasons I prefer the autumn,
Her sacrifice
For beauty, nature will pluck the limbs of trees
Sending her children forth,
Each one a wish,
A lifetime.
These curled corpses of spring
End up on the embers of a distant fire.

Limbus Patrum

Each of us will one day remember
That feeling of having misplaced a glove
In winter's first snowfall,
Or of losing a loved one to a hard-fought battle
With cancer or to some other question
We cannot answer.

Let of us each remember,
So we don’t need reminding
By another one lying on the cold table,
Tomorrow excised with a scalpel,
Or turned back into yesterday with pharmaceuticals
Whose real names we’d struggle to pronounce.

On the side of the street I am reminded
That a man in his seventies is out of work,
With sick children at home to care for.
Who cares for him at the end of his days?
Does he go to a home that’s out of the rain?

Let each of us know what this man thinks
Every night he enters this place,
Out of time, out of mind.