Pain-Filled Poetry and Sad Songs                         

 I took a walk outside to clean up the lawn.

Sprinkled among the grass and dead bushes in and out and in between

I saw broken sticks of every color shape and size and such …

To tell the truth with all that I saw…My battered spirit saw too much.

Rusting screws and nails…

flat tires in the making,

Lids from jars and metal toy cars

Lay in the spring sunshine baking.

A foot-long section of washing machine hose,

two quarters, a nickel and a dime…

a screwdriver blade, an empty can of Glade,

A wristwatch stuck in time.

I carry a black plastic trash bag as I roam my yard 

picking up everything in sight…

Nothing I find is as disturbing as a burned cedar shake, 

from the cottage on the corner that burned down on that horrible night.

I find an endless variety of our past life’s treasure,

now it is trash, because now it is broken, or simply not where it belongs…

Our possessions, yours and mine, inexorably tainted by Mother Nature’s wrath,

Things only useful today as the stuff … of pain-filled poetry and sad songs.