Moon Follow Me Down

I travel south on the Marc train
in the Tuesday morning darkness;
a nearly full moon moves with me
over the treeline as we speed to D.C.

Later, I stroll through the Smithsonian gardens,
sniff the lone white bloom on the gardenia bush.
I walk down Independence Avenue where mirrored
moons of CCTV cameras monitor my way to work.

Christopher T. George

I have written a blog entry for Barbara Ostrander for Desert Moon recording the fact of her passing and how it has hit our community, and including one of Barb's poems about her relationship with Africa ("Africa Unleashed"). What Barbara was about and what I am about is partly reflected in the following poem.

On one of her trips to Bethesda for treatment, Barbara was able to attend a history lecture I gave near Annapolis, which resulted in the following poem of mine written as part of Gary Blankenship's hyperpoem series, utilizing a line from Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" ("Time for you and time for me")--

Annapolis Harbor at Christmas

To Barbara

Somehow we find the time after your day
at the clinic, my workday, after we fought
traffic in the Maryland rain to make it late
to my evening lecture, the spaghetti supper.
Somehow, we find time as snow sifts down:
Time for you and time for me.

The snow melts on the water
and on the bronze statue of Alex Haley
as he reads to the bronze children,
to tell how Kunta Kinte landed here
all those generations ago as a slave
aboard the Lord Ligonier.

And you want badly to see the sea.
Well, this isn't the sea exactly, an arm
of the Chesapeake Bay. Yet, I feel
we're walking barefoot on a beach,
in sand dunes, among scraggy grass
at the ocean, in Maryland, in Africa.

Christopher T. George