Life Going On

I awaken at 6.00 a.m. and listen

to our President’s address 

memorializing Nelson Mandela 

and lay crying in the darkness

of a 6.00 a.m. time difference

between there and here, the dancing

swaying music of the background 

behind the podium a fitting 

accompaniment as one man – 

the first of his kind to lead a nation

in this hemisphere pays homage

to another one-of-a-kind man in 

his own place and time 

with my tears and ears, I too

paid homage and then went

and made Christmas candy

and watched the snow fall

life going on

Just-A-Man Mandela

Nelson
Tata to a nation
as you stand at yet
another gate, I wonder
what holds sway in your
remembering – decades in
a prison cell circumscribed by
those who would define you – were
they wrong? – by the violence you played
with in ever more desperate measures to claim
even the possibility of freedom for your own
or the women – the many women – what
is it about men of charismatic mein
that the women become your
drug of choice?  Your
children– will you
miss them as
they will
surely
miss you?
Do you ponder
the many meetings
and speeches and losses
and victories?  Do you forget
as we have the violence and recall
only the peace – for it was prodigious
the reconciling calls to a forgiving together
kind of living that you and others dared dream into
something approaching reality in the land that
so held your heart and soul in its wrenching
claim upon your destiny?  We so want
our saints to be perfect, so without
the many sins that hold sway in
our own lives – the humdrum
ordinariness of the wrong
won’t do for you
Mandela

I Was So Young When Nelson Mandela Was Dying

I was so young when Nelson
Mandela was dying – weren’t
we all?  Decade after decade
time passed and how strange
it must have been – to be man
and icon at once – how is that
skin inhabited?  Housed?
Defined?  Imprisoned?

Now Nelson Mandela is dying,
this time in earnest.

And a friend starts a FB group
of those of us who worked
and laughed and played and
fought together lo those many
years ago in ordinary time –
who can even remember the
80's?  I know I was there –
but they are truly
a blur in my memory now –
and he posts pictures – and I
look and am struck – as I always
am these days – by how very
achingly young we were –
we who knew so much that we
held the world carelessly in
our hands – living our blessed
lives in the far away from Africa
place that is West Virginia –
we laughed and worked and
played and fought as Nelson sat
and sat and sat – and who
could know then that freedom would
be his?  That leading the country
he begged to change would be his?
It never does to count too much on
things staying the same, for they
never do – a good thing, that –

and now it is a millenium later
and Nelson Mandela is dying
and I wonder if he was ever young
in that laughing, working, playing,
fighting kind of way that I was – so
unaware – I doubt it – it was a luxury
he was not accorded – that unawareness
and he, I think, was the better for it, the
one to be envied – ah, Desmond, what
will we do without him?

I was so, so young when Nelson
Mandela was dying.