In Writing: Dale Hobson

This poem is set on the night of December 8, 2020 after I drove home from the masked and socially distant village with the half moon shining high in my windshield. It took me a while to get it right, going through rewrites over the following week. 

Advent 2020

Snow blows through, snow melts away.
Things come and things go – but mostly
go as 2020 wanes toward winter.

Southeast hangs a hazy half moon
upon the falling gloom, like a lone lamp
at the edge of the darkened village,

like a white mask across a black face
in the ICU at night amid the twinkling
pea lights of monitors and ventilators,

like a heart half of hope and half of fear.
All winter the winnowing will run while
the world leans on luck and awaits its shot.

I lean against the kitchen window looking out
at this halfling light that sails upon the night
and send after it all my silent prayers.

While I was doomscrolling through the day’s news of politics and pandemic, the wind began to rise. I didn’t really notice at first, until I began to mistake it for a distant train passing through the village. Then the “train” arrived in a twister of maple leaves outside the window and the house began to shake. Each gust stronger than the last. The weather outside, the clamor on my screen and the weather in my head converged into extended metaphor.

Election Reflection

From far off, a low susurration heralds its coming.
On the next hill leaves fly, pennants of golden smoke.
Then louder, higher, the nearby treetops begin to 
bob and dance, the windows rattle, the studs groan.

Louder still, rising and falling, pines rock back
and forth, worrying at their roots. Saplings bow
and snap back. Wheelie bins flop open and topple.
Yard signs tear loose, cartwheeling down the road.

Hold tight; anything could happen – windows blow
in, roof rip away, hailstones the size of baseballs
pounding the car to junk. You never know what
big wind will bring, or what will still be standing.

When times are dark and seem to be getting darker, sweet pastoral reflections feel a little disingenuous.

Waiting Room

Each of these lines contains five silent prayers,
accent falling on the silence. Rhyme scheme
is irregular as nothing is similar to anything.

Voice is only person – mask over my mouth
muffling words beyond hearing across vast
social distance – what little one can find to say.

Half a year now in the waiting room. Who can say
how much longer? The clock says only tick-tock,
heart says only lub-dup. What else can be said?

Wildfire will be quenched or wildfire will spread;
America will fall or will find some way forward.
The waiting room is empty but for the waiting.

Stock photo: PikRepo

Life is full of complicated questions, seemingly impervious to solution, no matter how you clench the jaw or chew the pillow. The mind backs up like bad plumbing. Everything starts to smell a little funky. Luckily for us, every now and then all those complicated questions will find a simple answer.

The answer to everything

Needing once again to be out of the house,
I invent a few errands in town and ride out
into the full fresh green of June. A perfect day,
when all the tired old earth’s hurts are hid.

These cool mid-June days – just enough breeze
to keep the bugs at bay, but buttery with sun,
and such a hullabaloo of puffy clouds carpets
a sky that couldn’t be any bluer if it played the sax.

This is a day that has the answer to everything.
Pandemic? Green leaves, blue sky, white clouds.
Anxiety? Green leaves, blue sky, white clouds.
Anger? Green leaves, blue sky, white clouds.

Tires singing on the road, scent of pine and water
rushing in through the rolled-down windows.
For now, I’m happy as a house-bound workaholic
can be. Out of the house, out of my worried mind.

Venetian loafers. Photo: soletrain, Creative Commons, some rights reserved

Everyone old enough to remember where they were when the first humans landed on the moon does remember. I was 15 that summer and on a grand tour of the national parks out West with my family.

Our campsite was in walking distance of the Custer Park State Game Lodge and I suspected they would have a TV. They graciously let me in, even though I was the only person present not in formal evening attire for the big occasion, not even close.

Somehow, this recollection led me this morning off into an autobiography of my feet – or my footwear, anyway.

Man Shoes

50 years ago, I wore water buffalo sandals, cut-off jeans,
a short-sleeved denim shirt, and a string of seed-pod
love beads as I walked down the road to Calvin Coolidge’s
summer White House to watch Apollo 11 land on the moon.

We were camping in a tent trailer hauled behind my uncle’s
’67 Le Mans in the badlands of South Dakota where Custer
met fate, not far from Mount Rushmore: me, grandma,
my sister and mom and Dad. Brother Gerry was in OCS.

The next footwear to tickle my fashion fancy were
Dingo boots: square toed, with ankle straps, brass rings.
My denim shirt was graced at the collar with a red bandana.
Western was cool, at least according to the Grateful Dead.

But then, after Kent State, I went working class hero:
denim still – jacket, jeans and work shirt – but footed out
in steel-toed work boots. There were presses to run,
and a revolution in need of a minister of propaganda.

Sadly, the press burned down in 1980, so I went back
to running shoes, seeking escape from the Moral Majority.
There was no escape, apparently, but I ran on anyway,
through the millennium, on into the Age of Aquarius.

But then running shoes went bad. Sneakers got pricey,
Halloween-hued, with blinking lights. I persisted
anyway,  finding brown ones with inoffensive stripes,
holding on until the last pair was rotting off my feet.

We were in Boston, visiting our daughter, when I saw
the multi-story shoe warehouse near Downtown Crossing.
Surely somewhere within I could find respectable kicks.
But no. Every pair looked left behind by alien visitation.

I was ready to write the raid off until my daughter looked
me in the eye and said “Dad – you’re in your fifties now.
Why don’t you get yourself some man shoes?” – ouch! –
and took me down the aisles that smelled of leather.

Just past the checkout, I binned my decrepit runners
and slipped into the bliss of buttery-soft Venetian loafers.
Taking my now happy feet out onto the streets of the city,
I thought to myself, “I could do the moon walk in these.”