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Best Poems From
LAURENCE OVERMIRE
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253.
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Lightning From The Genome
99.9% of our genes are identical
One human to another
What difference, then is
One-tenth of a percent?
Enough to justify
Hatred, jealousy, contempt
War?
In one-tenth of one percent
We lodge the miseries of the
Human race
Proclaim ourselves better and
Best
Conquer and divide
According to divine rights of
A primitive mind
Unable to distinguish
Reason from insanity.
Laurence Overmire
Read more: war poems
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254.
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Look Homeward, Angel
“Where shall the weary rest? When shall the lonely of heart come home? What doors are open for the wanderer? And which of us shall find his father, know his face, and in what place, and in what time, and in what land? ” –Thomas Wolfe, from “Of Time and the River”
It took a while to find
And if you didn’t know where to look
You’d never know it was there.
The home I mean of Thomas Wolfe
—in the thirties—
The great Southern novelist.
I’d heard he lived in Brooklyn for a time
Same as me, rented an apartment, but where?
I finally found a
Reference in a book somewhere
With an address—the basement of number 40
Verandah Place.
It was my neighborhood, as it turns out
Just down the street
Somewhere below the Heights and the fabled
Brooklyn Bridge
But there was no marker, no monument
Nothing
To mark the history of this momentous place.
“Only the dead know Brooklyn, ” he wrote.
The building was owned by someone, so of course I
Couldn’t go in, but I wondered if the owner even
Knew the significance of this brick and plaster and
Wood.
All I could do was look on from outside:
A tiny window at ground level, not more than a foot of
Exposed glass above the back alley black tar pavement
Dry leaves and dust stuck in the cracked and peeling
Paint of its frame.
The blind, pale and yellowing, was drawn
Leaving a cold and lifeless sense of a space
No longer occupied.
There was no seeing in, and it was a wonder to me
How that young visionary writer managed at all
To see out.
How dark, how damp this tiny room
Must have been, and yet
Here
Somehow was the birthing, light blasting
Through that little window
To catch the world’s eye
A novel called, perhaps not without coincidence:
“Of Time and the River.”
(Previously published on Ancestry.com,2003)
Laurence Overmire
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255.
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Look Twice
What do you allow to enter your life
And what do you refuse to admit?
These are the choices that make you
Complete or incomplete being
That you are
The response ability
Is all yours
Call it fate
Call it chance
Call it God
The calling is inevitably
On some level conscious
Call it what you will
It must be called into account
In any assessment of who you are.
(Previously published in Quill and Ink Press, Vol 1 Issue 1, Oct 2003)
Laurence Overmire
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256.
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Lost Child
The child rocks back and forth
Shivering in the bleak night of a third-world winter
A blanket full of holes
Maggots crawling in the bedsheets
Her bony limbs contorted ‘round her breast
Scant defenders against the onslaught of the wind.
You will not hear her crying
You will not see her tears
Half a world away is easy to ignore
But the heart knows
What governments and egos and wallets must deny.
The snow falls with the relentlessness of Time
Claiming the lives of the helpless and abandoned
But the death of an innocent
Cannot be easily buried in the conscience of Man
Choices must be made
But who has the courage to touch the suffering?
(Previously published in The Oracular Tree, June 2000; Twins, Issue 12,2001)
Laurence Overmire
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