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Don Munro Poem
1963.
I ran crying to Uncle Jim, standing by the barn door.
We hugged, and I tried to hold the smell of him,
of Vermont -- Old Spice, oatmeal, rotting leaves in crisp October air.
"Oh, kid, you and me, kid ... you and me," he said.
But the car was waiting, all packed.
My grandparents yelled one more time, to come.
He stood alone, waving goodbye, his head held
to one side, a war injury.
Perhaps that's why he drank.
Or maybe it was living so far away from us,
in a wild place, where snow is measured in feet.
On winding roads, I cried for two hours, through valleys of orange and yellow and graveyards of granite, where men with stovepipe hats and ladies with hoop skirts lay side by side underneath the green.
Through my window, I counted the steep, pitched roofs.
Cows of black and white and brown.
Was Uncle Jim, by now surely in his house watching snowy TV, crying, too?
1975.
Uncle Jim is dead, at least he told me so, as he stood by my bed one night.
Even now, when I think of Uncle Jim, and how he held me, what he said to me in 1963,
I could cry.
Copyright © Don Munro | Year Posted 2012
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Don Munro Poem
By DON MUNRO
Moon River …
you once held my Huckleberry friend,
the two of us ... after the same rainbow’s end
in your timeless rhythm
as I pushed him in his swing,
blue
and
white and
chipped on the edges,
showing rusty metal underneath
because we were so poor.
My heart was filled with joy
even as he cried from the pain of
being in the cold world. So new.
He would come to me and I would sing:
“Wider than a mile … I’m crossing you in style
someday.”
And then when he left, his eyes would search the
blurry, dark images
for me … just me.
A miracle.
Sometimes when he came back, he would be
smiling, blindly searching.
“Two drifters off to see the world…there’s such a
lot of world
to see.”
And when I told him he was my Huckleberry friend
and I looked
into the pool of emptiness ... his brown eyes,
I could swear he knew me, all of me,
right from the very beginning.
Copyright © Don Munro | Year Posted 2012
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Don Munro Poem
3 am.
The alarm clock in my head wakes me with a
silent clanging.
Outside, the rain is falling so hard. It sounds like someone's
trying to break into my room.
Jesus.
It's Christmas Day.
It might as well be August 25th because the conversation in my head has not changed
since then. "You are a piece of shit."
I think of things I need to worry about, things I've worried about since August 25th and way before that.
My anxiety runs through my veins like hot chemo.
I stagger to the living room and stare at the half-decorated Christmas tree ...
gold balls weighing down one side. Empty green takes up the other. Oh, there are two figurines of kittens that I bought at a garage sale in Staten Island in 1998.
God. 3:10 am.
A whole day to spend by myself.
Not a fake friend in sight today, with their banal conversations about picking up their laundry or meeting at the gym at whatever time to do arms or back.
Just as well; I get a blank stare from them when I want to talk about chasing happiness or being childless at 53.
The TV is my savior. It pulls me out of myself.
Bing Crosby comes on singing "White Christmas." He's dancing
with those two impossibly shiny bleached blondes. And they all have those white, almost blue American teeth -- not one out of place.
12 pm.
I wake up on the couch and "White Christmas" is still playing; it must be a marathon.
Outside, the rain has turned to snow and there are two messages on my phone -- from Christian friends inviting me to their houses for the day.
It's tough being a Buddhist on Christmas. OK, so I know, as the Buddhists say, everything is OK as long as I let it be OK.
But this is one day of the year I don't want to "be."
I consider whether to shower. It takes 10 minutes to decide. I let the hot water run down my back, and I don't know if it's burning from the water or my nerve endings.
I don't want to face Christmas - but I have decided to join life and go to Cory's to see his kids, stare at the tree and eat some turkey.
I decide to take a Xanax, and I stick one in my pocket as assurance.
Maybe some of this gloom will yet lift from my heart.
Copyright © Don Munro | Year Posted 2012
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Don Munro Poem
Denim-blue sky wakes,
cotton puffs of charcoal clouds,
frozen morning light.
Copyright © Don Munro | Year Posted 2012
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Don Munro Poem
Snow falls on the brittle leaves of birch trees,
their branches miraculously overlooked by the December wind.
It makes a sound like the marching feet of scary Germans rushing through Poland.
Snow, mixed with freezing rain,
falls hard on the roof of an unheated barracks in Auschwitz,
filled with men and boys in pajamas.
It sounds not unlike the far-off thunder of the radio in the commandant’ s house,
the angry voice of the Fuhrer.
Snow, descending from the sky like shaved ice, on a brittle day,
5 maybe 8 degrees.
It covers the makeshift roadblocks in the streets of Warsaw,
making little mountains — so pure on the outside but fetid, rotten, corrupt beneath the fine powder.
This snow,
this ice falling to the ground,
sounds like Russian boots jumping over the mountains.
Rain in Gdansk,
a fine mist,
the smell of the sea.
It covers the streets, where men whisper things that will someday be heard
and old women fall on their knees to pray the Rosary.
This rain,
it smells of freedom.
Copyright © Don Munro | Year Posted 2013
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Don Munro Poem
Santa drunks crushing
in the cold train station
party glow warms.
Copyright © Don Munro | Year Posted 2012
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Don Munro Poem
Smiling thoughts – a rope
that helps me fight off sadness
I climb to the sun
Copyright © Don Munro | Year Posted 2012
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Don Munro Poem
"Negroes" and pork pie hats
white shirts, black ties
sweat stains under their arms,
even wetter, the pressed handkerchiefs that wipe faces and necks.
Father Abraham looks down upon his children
and sees the words "I am a man" over and over again.
It is hot, and white girls with beehives and Peter Pan collars
cool their heels in the reflecting pool. Images of a monument to a slaveowner look up at them.
Somewhere a song plays
on a transistor:
"I Can't Stay Mad at You"
shoo-bee-doo-bee-doo wop.
A dream is young at 50 -- compared to the kingdoms of Europe, that wall in China.
A dream at 50 won't die. Even now, it haunts the sleepless, promising a new birth of freedom -- to let men grow old together, hand in hand,
to let immigrants walk the hot streets of Arizona, work their lawn service jobs
and not fear being sent away.
Today, in the global freedom capital, tourists stroll clipped lawns and snap pictures of order and majesty, of white, doric columns, Greek temples.
They email the images back to starved souls in Odessa and Beijing.
That Skeeter Davis song still plays. You can hear it in the molecules of the air, the bits of history that have attached themselves to His marble feet, refusing to evaporate.
The wind carries a tiny echo about a dream and freedom
and America living up to its promise.
The hope of the world?
History is sticky, heavy ... like the sultry air of summer.
It won't go;
It lives.
It makes our hearts heavy
and haunts our minds.
Copyright © Don Munro | Year Posted 2013
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Don Munro Poem
Thirty more seconds
to reach the crest of the hill
I say yes again.
Copyright © Don Munro | Year Posted 2012
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Don Munro Poem
Golden
rays
cast two lines,
one shaded dark, one light
upon the carpet where I lie still.
This is winter light in the afternoon of my discontent.
Why cannot I be happy with this small glory; why must I yearn for the blinding light of summer,
when the carpet on which I sleep will scorch my back with heat and blind my eyes, making me flee the sun in search of shade, where I will think with fondness of snow and ice?
Copyright © Don Munro | Year Posted 2012
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