Patti Masterman Poems

Life don't ever leave these days:
When I can look my loved ones eyes-
And not ever have to turn away.

Though work be endless as the night,
...

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.
...

Reviled did I live, said I,
As evil I did deliver
Never odd or even-
Live not on evil.
...

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:
...

Humans think the whole earth
Should subjugate itself beneath their feet;
Even their religions cry out
That they are meant to dominate this world;
...

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

Outside, in a cloudless sky
I try to decode scattered wakes
In cuneiform, made by noiseless airplanes-
At right angles to each other, unfurling curls of silvery rickrack
...