World's Worst Spy

I would have been the worst of spies:

undisciplined, distracted--staring at a lovely
woman while I was s'posed to follow
another nation's spook. Forgetting codes
and passwords, and reading poetry
instead of pilfered documents.

I prob'ly would be tempted
to offer an exchange of knowledge
with the enemy, so that each side
would know exactly what the other
knew, and knew about the other.

This would cut down on expenses
And maybe make the world safer: Do
you scoff at this? I scoff. It's not the way
the agnonistic world works.

Too often I ask of ways
the agonistic world works: is
this trouble really called for?
Aren't there simpler ways?
I would have been the worst
of spies. I fear if I had been a spy,
my own side would have had me
shot.

hans ostrom 2025

Adjacent in Their Lives

She's pleased to think about the birds

on Earth, in canopies and copsds,

on sidewalks and stone statues, back

yards, blue bluffs. Among the refugees

or crapping on the autos of the ultra-rich.

What if, she thinks, someone could show

some images of Earth and as night comes
around, each bird were represented
by one lit-up pixel--so many birds, so
many lights, they would obscure
the night with light. That's what they do

for her--the common birds she sees
around. They shine a light of life
on her when she's brought low
by grayness sometimes in her soul.
Oh, crows and juncos, hawks or jays,
the pigeons in a city, owls out in
the woods. She loves the way they live,

so pointedly, with such sharpness and
no little bit of courage. They sing and caw,
trill and hoot, shriek and burble--hard
to feel much bitterness when she
sees birds--or even thinks of them,
the many, the few, in trees, on dew.
They're strangers and companions,
she and the birds, adjacent in their lives.

Hans Ostrom 2024