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Edward Ahern Poem
Resolutions
New Year’s resolutions
are meant to be broken
as soon as we realize
that deprivation and muscle strain
are not our natural state,
and that a comforted body
yields placidity of mind.
The Relationship
I can only think of you
with exasperation
at the challenging mix
of slick and stinging ways
that make you
my cactus.
The Passing of the Day
In the moment that sunlight shrivels
the day rebukes me
for wallowing in the known
and hiding in the comfortable,
for spurning those inappropriate,
and dodging alien ideas.
But the night reassures me,
with a recorded manifesto
that I already know by heart.
I can shutter my soul,
and face tomorrow’s day
knowing it will be unchanged.
Falling Away
Love is stepped cliffs
Of willingness to suffer.
Sheer drops from obsession to indifference.
The tiny mesa top holds less than a score
For whom I would give up my self.
Then a free fall to friends and relatives
Who are given affection and time
And a precipice further down
Acquaintances are doled out words.
And at chasm bottom are strangers
Who receive pro forma prayers and grudged money.
It’s impossible to love all of humanity
When I merely like myself.
Copyright © Edward Ahern | Year Posted 2017
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Edward Ahern Poem
Facebook Findings
Press and like the number five.
Jane the virgin on Twitter
This spoon takes away
the effects of the shakes
When you get fresh sheets
and you just shaved your legs.
This dude spent eight years
growing a chair
Shannon has exactly 200 friends.
Kakistocracy- government by
the worst available people.
You are convicted by your complicity.
Did Jesus leave us a tip to diabetes?
This is what happens when
you wrap your teeth in
aluminum foil for an hour.
Age your spirits at home.
There are several islands
atop the falls
and they are Zambian.
There's a lot of gross ********
that goes on
in the creative world.
Please like and share
Copyright © Edward Ahern | Year Posted 2016
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Edward Ahern Poem
The Layer Cake
We are a skewed birthday cake,
generations of lopsided layers
baked badly by ancestors
of fervent but defective intent,
teetering atop the stale and dried out.
The layers descend into the past,
inedible and mostly forgotten
while we the temporary top deny
bad ingredients and tiltings
and frosting with crème cruel.
We concoct the next tier
with hope and even love
but use a cookbook specifying
flour of custom and bias
and spices of mistakes.
It is a mighty wonder
that the cake still stacks
and those just set in place
don’t slide off to extinction
on the icing of our failings.
Copyright © Edward Ahern | Year Posted 2020
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Edward Ahern Poem
Noel
Amalgamated emotions, like good wine,
blendings for intensified taste.
Christmas stirrings of affection, greed and piety,
great nose, rich savor, but bittersweet aftertaste.
Copyright © Edward Ahern | Year Posted 2017
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Edward Ahern Poem
Gustavo’s Rite
He walked onto the harbor beach at sunset,
planting a small net on a pole like a guidon,
and setting soiled cloth bags around it.
Alone on the beach he began his dance.
Mismatched clothes flapping, he swayed,
then paced, then crouched to pat the sand
into a crescent, then stepped back and back,
dug sand by hand, finding black things
and tossing them into a jumbled pile .
He stepped easily, as if riding waves,
moving in erose shapes only he knew.
Then he gathered net and bags and left,
not glancing back at the cairn
of burnt wood and asphalt fragments.
All this I watched from a restaurant deck,
and had to ask the waiter about him.
“Gustavo,” he said, shrugging, “a local character.”
I nodded but kept silent, recalling that morning
walking another beach, trying to feel profound.
Copyright © Edward Ahern | Year Posted 2021
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Edward Ahern Poem
Miramichi Afternoon
The sloping shoulders of the river
tumble down rock on rock toward
the wind-riffled, slow flowing water.
Alder and grass creep down the slope
but will be ripped out once again by
the ice out floods of early spring.
The stones and haphazard boulders
are sun baked into featureless gray,
their bright minerals shrouded from view.
Land living things are more sparce here
and those present are paused by the heat.
Out on the water a dimple of a ring rise,
perhaps a salmon, more likely a trout.
A noiseless punctuation of somnolence.
Copyright © Edward Ahern | Year Posted 2025
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