Turning 78

Leaving My Copy of A Coney Island of the Mind

at a Bus Stop

It’s not the years in your life but the life in your years that count.

            —Chinese cookie fortune (found in my grandson’s wallet)

I.

Sorry Lawrence, I’m walking away from this misbegotten

bus shelter, your poem scratched into the walls, the one

you’ve been chanting in my ear for nearly sixty years.

I can no longer wait for that renaissance of wonder to show up.

I won’t stand here one second longer under this leaky roof

listening to the muzak of your sweet and hopeful lines

about a withering away of all governments, or how the meek

will be blessed and inherit the earth. I’m tired of leaning

around the corner, Lawrence, searching for green mornings

and youth’s dumb green fields to return, for the lovers

on the Grecian Urn to catch up and finally embrace.

It’s never going to happen. And if our cliched human history

is any guide, pigs will fly, cows will come home, and hell

will freeze over before the war will be fought

which will make the world safe for the Golden Rule,

JewsChristiansMuslimsAgnosticsAetheists boarding

your celestial bus, everyone in their places, smiles

on their faces, no more genocides over who God loves best.

II.

Frankly, I should have walked off decades ago, Lawrence,

every time another philistine fire-bombed the shelter,

leaving me out in the cold and rain, wet, shivering, waiting

like some dumb cow for retribution for what America did

to Tom Sawyer, for the Great Divide to be crossed,

for the storms of life to be over. I am sorry, my old sage,

eternal poet of my lost youth, I’m dropping your book

on the bench and walking out of your Brooklyn dreams,

trudging across the bridge, up gravel shoulders of highways,

across open fields, each day following then dragging

my shadow into whatever is ahead, the spirit of Emmet Till,

Matthew Shepard, the sweet Newtown babies,

our beloved Rory, as my guides, their clear voices speaking

over yours, Lawrence, telling me I am no Abraham, no Simeon,

no Didi, no Gogo, that nothing good comes of waiting around

for what is never to come, time to turn away from childish dreams,

from hope that is hope for the wrong things, living each day

not as if it’s the first or the last, but the only day there is.

           —SL, Port Royal, SC, April 2024