Patti Masterman Poems

Hominid: all tooth and bone,

Eyes and claws, and raptor-gaze
...

If all the creatures were enlightened
With a higher-ordered brain,
They'd always save- and never spend-
And in this way avoid pain.
...

The young child dies at maturity,
but the defiant teenager lives on-
transformed, quiescent.
...

Just dots and dashes line the cranium,
Like artfully arranged geraniums;
Coming hither, thither every compass-jointed day.
In the corpus land profundum,
...

I see you walking all alone
Down that road, just waiting for sunset,
Shaking your head, to silence the voices;
You know, that we all have to make choices.
...

You're tired, you're poor;
Wretched and homeless, beside the door-
Toss your torch, is there no more gold?
Then leave these storied lands of old.
...

Perhaps oddly, I think of you the most on this day,
The day we ate hot dogs, holed up away from the world,
Just the two of us; nobody else liked hotdogs.
It was our proximate communion, in the midst of the summer.
...

The faith of a child could ring
a church bell on the stillest day
and the sound carry
for thousands of miles
...

On that longest night you held my hand
And gave your shoulder, to cry on
As the briefest love of my life never got born:
...

Where angels fear to tread, there go I:
Stomping in my heavy boots, tracking earth
I always have to do it; why oh why
Can't I ever learn, a sense of mirth's
...