Salad Days

Barbara Ras

How easy then, the fun house at Lincoln Park

before it grew into a field of weeds, you could buy

five tickets for a buck from a blank face in a booth

and enter the dark with your brother to be scared

by tilting floors, phony doors, corpses

bursting out of coffins, and once out into blue sky

run breathless to your mother and father, happy,

you could have called them salad days,

but why would you –no one in your family

had read Shakespeare—so you bought

French fries, doused them with malt vinegar,

the four of you, competing for your share

of potatoes improved by salt and grease,

and nothing in those early evenings free

of care could have prepared you

to be the last one left, the one

with grief to spare.

(From The Blues of Heaven)

Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow on 29 September 2022

Origami haiku

Silke Heiss

The words ask for brea-

king – folding them over lines

– a curious thing.

Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow on 22 September 2022

Walking

Tony Voss

In the gardens of the seminary

We walk the modest labyrinth, a path

Bricked in the sandy grass, a pilgrimage

In miniature. There are no dead-ends here,

This is not a maze: one way will lead you,

Even though, as you approach, you may think

That you’re losing your way, to the still heart.

There turn around and wind back to the brink.

I will come back to walk the labyrinth

One day, when the grass is green, the earth

Is rich, the bricks are bright and clean, the trees

In leaf and bloom and filled with singing birds.

No detours, no deceptions: remember,

A labyrinth is not a maze. My way

Will be along the new familiar path

To the still welcome heart. And there I’ll stay.

Featured at The Red Wheelbarrow on 15 September 2022