Planning Saturday Sonnet

If it rains tomorrow morning I’ll brew
A pot of Vietnamese robusta
And slowly ramble through O’Hara poems –
Meditations in An Emergency.
But if it’s clear, we’ll take the morning tour
Of Lafayette Square with our new friends from
The National Civic Art Society.
And maybe later, brunch at Hay Adams,
And maybe take some snapshots of buildings
Up and down 16th Street. We’ll imagine
Being way uptown and seeing the dome
Of the Jefferson Memorial sit
Atop the White House. Or so it’d appear –
Like two stars in the heavens that seem one.

beat week poetry II

For Etheridge Knight

I love your poems’ cuss words:
sparse, efficient, precise –
though I know Mrs. Coley
would never include your work
in her black lit anthologies –

English teachers of our youth
detested cuss words about as much
as today’s teachers hate wikipedia,
as much as librarians despise google –

but i encourage students to use
whatever works for them, expresses
their needs, their dreams, their realities –

I want to read Dark Symphony tonight,
and laugh and hide inside the lines.