Chinatown's third floor wallpaper

carefully chosen
to stir a faded memory
of home’s backyard blooms

The Day FDR Died

FDR died on
my mother’s twenty-fifth and
my brother’s second birthday
back in 1945, sixty-three years ago today.

It was in the afternoon when she heard,
after a mid-day party with cake.
She was working in her mother's flowers
in the front yard, near the porch,
and he was playing nearby.

Her mother came out on the porch and said
We just heard that Franklin Roosevelt is dead.

Must have been a lot of mixed feelings
that day.

Season Honor

Tidal Basin

cherry blossoms’ rich aroma
thicken the air, and
branches bow with a delicate weight,
dipping pedal tips and stamen in the tide,
flooded under the influence of the new moon.

(from District visit)

Circumnavigating the Basin

The soldier’s khaki camouflage fails to hide him, the soldier’s wife can see him, and smiles at him, and shares the picnic lunch in the shade on a blanket of pink blossoms.

The clerk, loose tie, free from his terminal, now with pen and pad, studies “Just Enough Hungarian.”

The young Korean pulls thick skin from the orange, breaks the fruit, and hands a trio of slices to the old Korean sharing his bench.

The bureaucrats jog in pairs, another with palms and face on the sidewalk counts his push-ups out loud on the east side of Treasury, another using a bus stop shelter for a chin-up bar on the west side of Commerce, another dozen in touch football in the shadow of Washington’s Monument, pausing to regretfully learn the time from a passerby; there’s time for two more plays.

Voices from Eastern and Western Europe, dialects from Middle and Far East, accents from Central and South America, laughing chatter from Crestview Middle and Lakewood High students, all drift up, float around the bleached columns surrounding Jefferson, and out and over the blossoms and the basin.

(from District visit)

Paradox Beauty

In FDR’s 4th Term

Pink cherry blossoms drift down from limbs laden heavy,
grown old from sapling gifts from her grandfather's father.
Water falls over sharp-edged cut granite blocks stacked high,
commitments and words of comfort chiseled deep into grey veins.

The bride floats in white billows,
her black eyes held prisoner by her groom’s warm stare,
both seemingly unaware of their photographer,
or the dozens of strollers through FDR's fourth term
capturing the moment with cell phones.

Eleanor would be so pleased with it all.

(from District visit)