Poem for Wednesday

From The New World
By Grace Schulman

Orange alert has glared over this city
since terror acquired colors. Orange,
not yellow, not even yellow elevated.

Before Dvorak's Ninth, at Lincoln Center,
guards worry my handbag, stuffed with war news.
Oak leaves stick to pavement, yellow-to-orange

and high orange, brightest before they wither.
This year they sadden us. Talk was of endings,
not leaves but unrecurrent lives, and yet

with others now, we sink into a hush
like sanderlings that fly on a soundless cue.
Once the composer said his symphony

was Czech, as he was, that he added
"From the New World" in the final draft,
an offering for three years in America,

but in an oboe's long, plaintive vibrato,
I hear the phrases of Hasidic melodies,
African chants, come-thou's and kyries

I caught once on a street corner downtown,
four blocks merging like a napkin's points.
I raced a traffic light's orange-to-red

to find a synagogue confronting churches,
Baptist and Roman, eyeing one another.
High above street whines, music soared in quarrels,

moans, blues, calls-and-responses, hymns that rose up
together from stone. It took a Czech patriot
to restore that day. Now the people cheer

so loud you'd think a New World is beginning,
the clamor telling us this world will do
as long as we can have some more of it.

Outside, the founatin shoots the stars.
We glance upward, smiling, even when
a leaf spins down to concrete, crisp, high orange.

--------

Orthodontists are insane. I say this because my younger son is getting his upper braces off on Wednesday -- a time of great rejoicing -- but he discovered that he had a loose bracket last night. Just to be on the safe side, because they had warned me that they wouldn't take the braces off if he had any loose brackets, I called to alert them that this had just happened...and they told me to bring him in to have them glued back on! For one day! Can teeth really move that far out of position in 36 hours?

Anyway, since I was in the mall where the orthodontist's office is, I went to the Bath & Body Works semiannual sale and stocked up on $5 wallflowers, Brown Sugar & Fig and Coconut Lime Verbena creamy body wash, and Fresh Vanilla body lotion which has been discontinued but they had a couple back in stock. Spent $25 total for nine items. Didn't dare get more because not all the scents last well if you store them for too long. Was by then starving, since I hadn't had any breakfast or lunch, and after dropping younger son back at school I went to California Tortilla for a cup of chicken tortilla soup, which made me very happy.


Atop the hill above Devil's Den.


Army of the Potomac.


New York Independent Battery.


Facing attackers below Little Round Top.

Did a little work in the afternoon and spent the evening trying to get as much personal information off this LiveJournal as possible...I know it's still quite possible for anyone doing a bit of research to track it all to my real name, but I don't have the web site glaring up there anymore and all the links are to Cruisedirector journals, not my "real life" ones. I've been trying to figure out what to do about the fan fiction...since it's all locked in here, I've felt relatively safe, but I'd sort of like to move it altogether...the problem is that I can't put it in my comm backdated, so rather than drown my flist there with old stuff, I've been piling several stories into single entries. There's no way all the Trek stuff will fit like that, though.

Bush is still appointing evil judges and MySpace is acquiring Photobucket and I worry about the future of the free Internet both from the US government and the greedy meddling corporate interests...