You have to love them to sift their latrine,
The uric fragrance burning your nose and eyes
As you render their special place fresh and clean--
One of them watches, impatient, and sighs.
You have to be ready for sleep-rending howls
When one recovers his ragged cloth ball--
At twelve or two--shaking it with feral growls,
Boasting his prey up and down the hall.
You must be attentive--even at four--
If bowls are empty and bellies not full:
Rude rattling and scratching on the bedroom door
Has such a hypnotic, nerve-racking pull.
How apt the pharaohs decreed them divine,
While litter-box slaves were treated like swine.
Bert Woodall
What will I do with you,
Old battered dime store mug?
You were Mother's favorite,
When she cared about such things.
Old battered dime store mug
With your bluish crackled glaze,
When she cared for all her things,
You perched on the highest shelf.
On your bluish crackled glaze
Dust motes were spores of time
As you perched on the highest shelf,
A bookend for her best-loved poems--
But dust motes devoured time,
And our dusting was all in vain.
As a bookend for her best-loved poems,
You could only hold your place,
When our dusting was all in vain
And she left her world of order.
It was yours to hold a place
Among her once-treasured things
When she left her world of order
(You being Mother's favorite
Of all her few treasured things),
But what will I do with you?
Bert Woodall
Pill bugs wet with dew
as crawling gray domes mirror
green turf, salmon sun.
Copter seeds whirling,
a squirrel chases paper
treasure for her nest.
Young cat mock-tweeting,
wily sparrows unheeding,
paws press on the screen.
Bert Woodall
They cast a lengthy shadow lurching forward,
Straining beneath a sun that doesn't turn,
So faithful to the heliotropes bent toward
Its heat and light: They never fear the burn,
These supplicants of Ra, both men and weeds.
Straw-hatted pilgrims--canna lily stalks
Attending as they kick puff balls of seeds--
Carve with mower tracks soft emerald walks
In sacred courtyards of a humid shrine.
Nearby, the priestly irises preside,
Anointed lightly with the workers' brine,
While the weary drudges serve their cult with pride:
They sense the god who made them is aware,
But drenched and dirty, doubt that he could care.
Bert Woodall
