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Best Poems From
LAURENCE OVERMIRE
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293.
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Lest We Forget
The movie was about Jews
In some prison camp or something
A long time ago, who knows
And most of them died but this
One survived and that was about it.
We left as soon as it was over
And went out and got pizza.
Laurence Overmire
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294.
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Let's Be Blunt
We live in a world where
People treat one another like—
(provide your own appropriate 4-letter word here)
At home, work, school
It’s all the same
Our misguided priorities
Pitting us against
Ourselves
Climbing to the top of a sinkhole
of humanity
Grappling for a toehold
Our feet pressed into the nose and eyes
...of those below us
Our fingers dug into the backs
...of those above
Should we wonder then that monsters
Ooze out of our wounds
To claim what is rightfully no one’s
And dare we shun responsibility
For not recognizing
Who we are?
(Previously published in The Underbeat Journal, July 2003)
Laurence Overmire
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295.
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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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296.
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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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