Dennis Haskell: Two Poems

Numbers

Another Christmas, another New Year’s Eve,

the world sparks, searching for hope and serene

times, but I myself can hardly believe

the new number: two thousand and seventeen

just doesn’t seem possible. As a child

I calculated how old I would have to be

when the century ended—the wild,

ridiculous age of 52 would add up to me

and I could never have imagined where

I am now, in the country, with our son

and your ashes just across the road; there

he and I spread their coarse crumbs

of memory, numbly, almost five years ago.

Five: another number I can’t comprehend.

Incomprehensibility is all I have to show

though numbers are cruelly meant never to end.

The year that has been showed how unwise

the world can be, but for me was rewarding:

a new house, a new book, to my surprise

I could feel, and love again. Somehow I’m sure

you wouldn’t mind. But the years, 2016

and 2017, of course can mean nothing

to you, nor you to them, a heady fix

of numbers that relate to you

only in the harsh, haphazard mathematics

of my mind, where addition is blind,

where numbers, fear and hope intermix

and subtraction cannot be, or be refined.

        Dennis Haskell

Wisdom

For Leah,

born 7 Nov 2016

Little bundle of joy, you lie back,

eyes scrinched, lips pouting, crayfish red,

unbelievably twelve hours old,

totally oblivious, tucked tightly

in your bunny rugged bed,

how you shine the surface of our lives,

how you take us to the watery depths,

soar us into the incomprehensible blue,

how you connect us so mightily

to happiness, to mystery, to the depths

of blood, to the whole wonder of being.

While you slipped into the world

two urgent candidates for President

abused each other ferociously,

fighters in Syria slaughtered

one another, Australia’s sad

political leaders nagged and whined

and you sleep, you breathe so gracefully

I thank heaven, or fate, or chance

or whatever, for what you absorb

and absolve, for what

you unquestionably are.

Dennis Haskell