Two Poems by Michael Paul

by Michael C. Paul

Trash Heaps

Our cities are just trash heaps if you think,

I say that with my tongue firmly in cheek.

Look underneath your couch and you will find

Your daughter’s toys from when she was just three;

Dig down and find the coin your neighbor dropped

Before you bought the house in ninety-four.

Dig deeper still and find some broken shards

Of porcelain the Ming sold in the East

Then shipped to England under James the First

Whose colonists left fragments in the dirt

Of some old homestead on our eastern shore,

Abandoned in the time of famine there.

Below that lies a flinty arrowhead

The natives shaped before we counted years.

Before he moved, my neighbor once could dig

A well in Mosul, there to find in clay

A tablet written in cuneiform,

Of gods whom no one worships any more,

And kings who claimed to reign ten thousand years.

My neighbor, when he lived across the sea,

Beside the Huang He’s yellow, shifting banks,

Could find on ancient bones and turtle shells

Perplexing questions scorched by Xia kings,

Who prayed their ancestors could help them out.

We leave our scattered relics where they fall,

For cities yet unbuilt to find again,

Long centuries from now, when we are dust.

For the Great Winds That Blow Across the Plain

For the great winds that blow across the plain,

Young helianths, all turning toward the sun,

Broad fields of wheat that shimmer gold in light,

The cherty limestone hills that roll away

Beneath blue skies that seem to never end;

For all the songs the meadowlarks call out

To one another as they perch atop

The limestone posts that hold the barbed-wire fence;

For children laughing out among the corn,

For shade at noon, and for the rosy dawn,

For the sweet scent of fields of new-mown hay,

The musty smell of freshly turned-up earth,

The steaks that sizzle on the deck out back,

While Mama’s bread is cooling on the sill,

And from the stove, a fragrant mesquite smoke.

For all of these, I’d give the city up,

To have it like it was when I was young.