March Madness

This morning, I wondered if I had picked up the wrong prayer book.  Why this reading about the boy Jesus being lost in the temple?  Then I realized that it's March 19, the feast day of St. Joseph (father of Jesus), and we don't have very many Bible passages that show Joseph in action.  For more on this feast day, see this blog post on my theology blog.

It's also my mom's birthday--how can we be this late into March?

Yesterday morning, I wrote about my struggle to find enough time, and yesterday evening, I realized that it's not just me.  I compared calendars with two church friends to try to find a time when we could go see A Wrinkle in Time.  We all have jam-packed schedules until well after Easter.  Sigh.

And now it is time to bring this writing to a close, and it's quite a short post.  So I went hunting for a poem that I haven't posted yet, something to do with lack of time.

I didn't find quite that poem, but I did find one from my second chapbook, I Stand Here Shredding Documents.  I must have written it in the years of the economic crash, somewhere around 2008 or 2009. The character in the poem is not  me, since I wasn't looking at any company books back then (or now)--but plenty of people were.

It's interesting to read it from such a distance of years; I barely remember writing it, but I do remember that time period of experimenting with rhyme and form.  I remember those years as producing poems that weren't very good, but I like this one.

So, a sonnet for your Monday morning--and a wish that we might have more sonnets in our busy lives!




Nine Pomegranate Seeds


The books declare the finances in arrears.
She has stared the numbers to a haze
as if an oracle might appear
to point the way out of this maze.

Her early training prepared her to teach
Fairy Tales and Mythology. She looks, tiring,
for a path of bread crumbs, a way to reach
a way out of this haunted forest of budget cuts and firing.

She knows it is too late. She has bitten
the fruit and gone to the banquet to dine.
She has sold her principles because she is so smitten
with her health insurance, her salary, and fine wine.