First Conflict (sonnet)

One World War ended the year he was born,
and the second began when arrival of a child
delayed his volunteering or getting drafted
for a while. When another infant came, his
world remained the same: relatively safe
and welcoming, despite the nightly news
pouring onto the armchairs they pulled close
to the radio once their girls had gone to sleep
in milk-sweet dreams and honey cribs -
quiet barriers against the reports of horror
about Pearl Harbor or that mad beast
of Europe, Hitler, whose insane assaults
maimed, killed, or imprisoned those still
holding sweet visions of milk, of honey.

Trying To Get The Story Straight (villanelle)

We come along and tell them what to do
and pay their workers in a different way,
but who knows what is right for them or true?

Demands made on the rich are rare and few,
yet the poor have little choice in what we say
when we come along and tell them what to do

about living their own lives, but tell me, who
can speak for another or even know how to pray
for what's best for them - or right or true?

With food scarce, black market prices are too
high for anyone but the very rich to pay
unless we come along and tell them what to do

with their own money, capping costs, so you
and I can afford things too, if we have our say,
but who knows what is right for them or true?

Workmen mull around like there's nothing to do,
and, standing in rubble, they fret the day away
until we come along and tell them what to do,
but who knows what is right for us - or true?

In Camp, Stirring

I woke up cold.

I woke up hungry.

I woke up cold and hungry and
too tired to rest - much less
to sleep.

Some say we're the best ones for
this job, but is that.? Will that
be good enough?

I do not know what
to expect
of this cold hunger.

Curtain Call: Mediterranean Theatre (haiku)

All over our camp,
the fat lady-bird sings, "Spring!"
We are going home.

(c) 02, Mary Harwell Sayler, from the chapbook, Winning The Wars

Down Kinney Town

Feet bare, the girls came up today,
and Mama gave them ouch-grown shoes
that once belonged to me or Kay,
but, oh, I longed to give them too.

Two girls they were: soiled blonde, unkempt -
not like Mama's girls who shone
in new-sewn clothes and often dreamt
of finer galaxies than home.

With clean hands bare, could I - a child -
share much with girls from a small shack, wild?
But one said, "Come," so I went down -
down the tangled path to Kinney Town.

Theirs was adventure I could play.
A cold potato rationed me -
eyeless, grown in soil, unbent: they
gave that last leftover. Free.

I took.
Then home I went with backward look.

Spring Rites For A Dead Bird (haiku)

Into a shoebox
we hummed "March Funebre" by
Chopin, not knowing.

Outgrowing Grammar School

In the very back corner, he sat: his long legs winging
beyond the desk; his bare ankles hanging beneath
the cuffs of hitched-up pants of navy blue; his

lean wrists springing from jacket sleeves that might
have fit any other boy in the room. He didn’t
come often, but when he came the teacher called

on him to read, and so he read – in the same low,
slow monotone usually reserved for the delivery of
bad news. Pale and painfully shy, he avoided the view

of every eye – his face blanched free of all surprises.
Remarkably unconstrained, his plain-cut brown hair
draped down across a smudge-stained forehead

like a curtain closing on what he’s already seen –
at sixteen. Years later, I think of him with shame,
unable to recall if I even knew he had a name.

c) 02, Mary Harwell Sayler, from the chapbook, Speaking Peach