So long May

Thank you all, Maydayers new and old, for joining in this year's collaboration. It's been a pleasure reading your poems and comments. Let the creativity continue!
Until 2016, Angeline

Beyond comprehension

The suited man at my door

jabs the fine print between

pasturelands and sparrow,

demands I repeat

the correct name for God,

walks away.

The trembling usher at church

has been married 56 years today.

He whispers, I’m afraid to wish

for more. The years

are good so long

as the mind is clear.

The woman in the care

home couldn’t tell you the name

for the soft thing that holds

her up. We asked her to pray,

she folded her hands.

The child’s tumour disappeared.

folktale

Once upon a time in a faraway land,

there was a girl whose mother loved her.

When the girl was only two, her mother died

in childbirth. The father sent the baby

to his wife’s sister in a nearby village –  

a widow with two daughters. He married her,

and brought home a stepmother

who locked his girl in the broom closet.

The father who had borne wounded soldiers

through streams of bullets to the trains,

too weak to defend his daughter.

To a land that promised peace,

the girl’s family wore old stains.

Found new broom closets.

Leaving her beloved mother beneath the violets.

Plunging hands into fresh soil, the girl grew tomatoes 

and tenderness. Two years of her mother’s love was enough.

In years to come, in this new land,

there will be a girl whose grandmother loved her.

Hey bro

Do you remember when you called my cat Tristan a little nasal mist?

Remember those matching Smurf shirts and horrid orange fleece jackets Mom sewed us, so she couldn’t lose us in the crowd?

Remember the Christmas I gave you chicken pox? The summer camp where we discovered ring worm, deer ticks, impetigo?

The way I risked my life on the swing set to put on a circus show for you? The roads we built in sand? Did you know that the day you put the El Camino in gear and we could have crashed through Oma’s wall, I didn’t stop you because I thought something interesting might finally happen to us?

Remember the times I held you on that rocking horse? I’d get bored and leave, and you’d keep rocking that plastic tail into the floor till you fell asleep. You never fell off.

Remember my Go, go, go! when you ran the hundred metre? You even let me put my arm around you when you won gold.

Remember how we kept A Small World After All spinning, long after leaving Disney? How many Fisher Price record players did we bust? I had a wicked air guitar to I love bananas. I loved the way you stuck out your tongue when you laughed.

Do you remember the rules: how many times we had to knock the punching clown, orbit the dehumidifier, and land on the Rebounder to be crowned king? What was our victory song?

How you beamed when you got your first lawnmower and gave me a business card for Chad’s Lawn Care. The way you kissed your fingers like an Italian chef when you fried me perogies.

Remember that I’ll always be three years older, but you’re ten times stronger. On that note, remember I’m sorry for that time I pushed your head onto the linoleum like a Weeble. Remember I was three.

Remember: a man in a dream once asked if I’d trade you for a puppy, and I said yes and then I cried until I woke up because I missed you.

Remember when Daddy bought the town’s first camcorder and we saw ourselves on television. We made click noises with our tongues and pressed our camera-shaped Lego to the screen, capturing our moment.