Three Poems by Richard Fein

LIVING CENOTAPH

I know the history of the building

or rather the lot it’s built upon.

I once played cowboys and Indians where it stands now.

Was a wilderness then to a ten-year-old.

A pedigree of trees all the way back to the Indians,

and on it a wigwam or so I called it,

that home for the homeless one.

I’d spy on him from the bushes,

as he went in and out through his burlap door.

My main fear was not discovery,

but where his toilet was,

so I’d carefully tiptoe through the weeds.

Now a complex of lives towers before me,

a whole society stacked into stories,

where once there was only one alone in a shack.

The last time I saw him he was standing on the street,

while a bulldozer crashed through his hovel,

the burlap flailing from the wheels like a severed lizard’s tail.

Looked again and he was gone.

A high rise grew from the vacant lot.

The building marks no memory of him.

Only I do, and surely no one else does.

I’m his living cenotaph, as long as I have memories.

GREAT ESCAPE

But I’m beached on a desolate Brooklyn street. And I shiver.

A strange light in the dark sky sparks unspoken wishes.

Above, that bright singularity invades heaven’s blackest region.

It moves quickly through the starless patch of sky.

Maybe it’s my proverbial ship long overdue for a docking.

I hold up my thumb.

Perhaps a keen-eyed starship captain

will give this wannabe galactic hitchhiker a lift.

Or maybe a Vulcan science officer is looking for specimens.

I’m game for an anal probe, though I’m no trekkie.

Of course it’s just some jetliner passing over Cropsy Avenue,

and no up there can see me.

I couldn’t afford the fare anyway.

But what if? What if?

HONOR THY MOTHER

On the T.V. news yet another kwashiorkor-bloated infant

cries with surprising strength,

all the way from some failed nation.

Electromagnetic waves send the desperate sobs across the seas

to light the phosphorescent screen on the shelf  above the beer bottles

stacked high over my head,

as I sit nursing a stein of foreign brew.

Like every hunched-over patron here,

I stuff a buck into the donation box on the bar counter.

But the name on the box is Little League.

That child looming on the T.V. screen will die of protein starvation

before any greenback could put meat in his mouth. 

A complimentary buffet is on the counter.

I lift one small sausage

and raise it toward the distant child to offer a toast,

not to him but to my mother,

whose long ago scolding still haunts me,

whose long ago scolding still taunts me,

“Eat, you’re too skinny. Children in other countries are starving.”