WHAT  WE  CAN'T  DO

     by  Vern Fein

What if one woman and I
were left on the Earth
to propagate the human race?
What if we couldn’t invent anything—
from a battery to a rocket,
cure small pox?

Adam and Eve didn’t bother
with math or technology,
the ground watered itself,
luscious fruit to pluck,
the Four Rivers pure,
animals best friends.

When they left the Garden,
they needed it all,
progressed into civilization,
the last few hundred years,
bombs, machine guns, tanks,
trains, automobiles planes,
skyrocketing technology,
computers, the Internet, I-Phones,
from agrarian to urban,
plowing to the moon.

I couldn’t create any of these things—
a failed bird house in shop class—
my dear wife hardly better.
I write poems,
read on the poetry circuit.
She’s a garden artist.
We can’t develop a circuit for anything
or a chip,  
would never have thought of atoms,
become our hero Salk.
Glad there have been billions
to invent these marvels.

Without the weapons though,
please, without the weapons,
but, it seems, those come with the territory.

 

Bio: A retired special education teacher, Vern Fein started writing poems just a few years ago and has published over one hundred poems on over sixty sites, a few being: *82 Review, The Literary Nest, Gyroscope Review, Courtship of Winds, Ariel Chart, Broadkill Review, Soft Cartel, and River and South. This avocation has become a delight in life, particularly during the Covid isolation.

 

The Clock Ticks

    by  Patrick O" Shea

 

The clock ticks as the day passes by, and the people gather round in their attempt to hear the sound of

Breathing in the ward, the wheels click over the floor

As another bed is rolled in with another person lying there, the days begin to seem to be just the same,

But they can never be the same again, there is a silence,

A silence that now gathers like shadows gather as the sun goes down, moving across the walls of those

Places in which so many now must be, lighted by the tragedy

That is now unfolding in so many places around the world, the faces caught on some television stations

So it is known who has gone away on their own, without a friendly face around.

 

There is a begging in the voices that you hear asking those who perhaps do not care, to please care, to

Take a moment to think beyond their limited way of living,

To take a moment beyond their limited way of seeing, and to understand that those who are taken away

May be their sister, their brother, their mother, or their lover,

There is a simplicity in the grief that you see, it is a loss of so many, a woman walks away on a street in

Spain after her father has died, he died alone without her touch,

And you see the shoulders slumping on her body as she walks away, the loss unexplainable to her, she

Knows they cannot speak or laugh together again, and she is so very alone.

 

There is pain on so many streets in the world now, and it is as if a tsunami of grief is pushing all before it

In a merciless wave of loss, breaking upon every person on the street,

There is no cleansing in this tsunami of any rubbish on the street, or of any trees that have stood for so

Many years, there is only the loss of more bodies swept away in a pandemic,

In the spring of the year or the fall that may be experienced in another place, where beauty should be

Now experienced, it is difficult for so many to remember beauty,

There is only loss that is being shared, death being known, burials in lonely mass graves, and the world is

Now caught in a new time in this world, as the clock ticks.

Patrick O’Shea

 

13 April, 2020

 

Bio: Patrick O’Shea is  living in Rijswijk Holland. Travel this year has been rather limited by the virus springing up all over the world, but he is still hoping to walk some of the Camino from Pamplona to Santiago de Compostela in September 2020. His  writing of late, has been impacted a bit by the situation with the virus, and not quite as much being produced, but keep on trying. The garden is keeping him busy, and he gets comfort from reading, and listening to music.