Monday, November 11, 2024

Undocumented immigrants pay $96 Billion in taxes per year

Seagul, Hawk, and Here We All Are

In a pounding but warm rainstorm,
I dropped off the weekly sack
of canned foot to the food bank
run by a church. A seagull
landed on the church's big cross
and shrieked. Translation?

"I like water!" or "Praise the
feathered Lord!" or "I'm a gull
and I like to scream!" On the way
home I spied a hawk sitting
in a gentelemanly way on a
power-line, watching cars go
by, waiting for an unwary squirrel
or the evening rabbit commute.

Yes, well, here we all are,
traveling another one of our days.

hans ostrom 2024

Angry, salty and nsfw!

Thursday, November 7, 2024

The Limits of Anxiety

Anxiety feel like breathless
pressure in the chest,
a fluttering suddely of crazed
birds. Anxiety morphs
into dread, shakes the bars
of its cell for help.

Low charcoal clouds
move in, park just above
the head, which wants
to love hope but can't.

Anxiety's gaze wants
to weld itself to a dark pit,
a kind of sick security.

But it is nothing, anxiety
is nothing compared to what
the tortured imprisoned,
the constantly bombed and
displaced, must feel always,
even as they sleep, if they sleep.

hans ostrom 2024

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

From Time to Time

The phrase "from time to time"
makes my mind see stepping stones
set wide-apart. Circles of light
on stages. Old pulpy catalogues
and sports newsprint pages,
imploded miners' shacks, 
and burial mounds, retired profs
(strangers now on what they'd thought
of as "their" campuses) taking
hard steps into a library. "From

time to time" makes me sad,
forlorn, and blue--but glad
to be alive today though feeling still
a chill on back and shoulders as Earth
spins me toward my personal last time. 

hans ostrom 2024

Saturday, November 2, 2024

Without Shadow

My shadow left me for a day.
It joined a general shade.
In sun I looked down on the walk
In vain to find a silouette made.

Without my shadow, I felt sad
And wondered did I still exist?
Did light sail through my body now?
Was I insubstantial as a mist?

My shadow, it returned at last
And soldered itself to me.
My shadow proves my substance, yes--
It places and displaces--see?

hans ostrom 2024

Northern Hemispheric November

Oh, November--
my bête noire,
cabinet of cold rain,
sinister capitan of snow,
avant garde of Winter,
tree-stripper, soil-sealer,
gloom-injector, glum puritan.

Oh, November, neither
enemy nor friend, just a
doom-inducer, a sour neighbor,
a moldy blanket, a day-cutter,
a sun-shrouder: you
are a head-cold kind of month.

hans ostrom 2024