Category: Poem

I went to a small choral music school, Westminster Choir College, during the late 1960s. I enjoyed walking into town leaving the campus and turning right onto Hamilton Street until it became Wiggins. When I passed by Princeton Cemetery, I’d love picking up a stick and running it across the iron fence bars as I walked by, something about the percussive sound and feel of the stick in my hand was reassuring. I also held my breath until I had safely reached the other side of the graveyard. Just in case a parasitic spirit was looking for an unsuspecting host. That cemetery always made me think of my first gin and Wink, a tart cocktail that was offered to me by an upperclassman who lived off campus in a rented boarding house room on Madison Street. One night, loopy after consuming more of the grapefruit flavored potion than I should have, I somehow got turned around as I made my way back to campus and ended up in the cemetery at Aaron Burrs’ grave. Somebody on the sidewalk—it must have been another Choir College student—seeing me on the wrong side of the fence called out, “Westminster’s this way,” and I followed him home.

Hold
	your breath
passing cemetery’s view
to the corner your safe
a break
	would prove
the first to go
might well be you

A children’s game
on a summer afternoon
as the sun shines through
	iron
		fence
			casting
				bars 
on the sidewalk

		—March 1968

Rediscovered this relic written when I was a college sophomore, when it seemed we were all writing poetry.

The crowded street
parts it way
as a young boy 
finds his way
through a dreamlike world
of games and candy

Down warped steps he goes
his god to meet
a nickel in
and then retreat
to a world of
bongs,
twangs and
rings
of misled dreams
in happy hours
of childhood

—Fall 1968

Sometimes words, whether a poem, a lyric or a piece of prose, can touch us immediately upon hearing them and stay with us forever. This happened to me during a Christmas Eve service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Monmouth County in Lincroft, NJ in 1983. I was serving as the church’s music director, so I was thankful for a break in the many carols, anthems and musical interludes being performed that night when it came time for a unison reading toward the end of the service. The minister at the time, the late Harold R. Dean, led his congregation in a reading of an excerpt from an epilog to a story by William Henry Harrison Murray in his book Christmas in the Adirondacks (1898). As a community we read aloud together… “Ah, friends, dear friends, as years go on and heads get gray, how fast the guest do go! Touch hands, touch hands, with those that stay. Strong hands to weak, old hands to young, around the Christmas board, touch hands.”

The words resonated with me deeply and the reading passed all too quickly. I needed time to process what we had just recited together before rushing into the next musical selection. Luckily there was a period of silence following the reading, which afforded all of us present a moment to reflect and a chance to take hold of the nearest person’s hand.

I recently came across Murray’s full epilog, which he originally wrote as prose, and share it with you in verse form below. What a wonderful blessing or toast to share with friends and loved ones when gathered together this holiday season, especially at a time when our civil discourse appears all but dead and we grow weary battling mutant virus variants that plague our world.

Ah, friends, dear friends,  
as years go on and heads get gray—  
how fast the guests do go!  
Touch hands, touch hands  
with those that stay.  
Strong hands to weak,  
old hands to young,  
around the Christmas board, touch hands.  

The false forget,  
the foe forgive,  
for every guest will go  
and every fire burn low  
and cabin empty stand.  
Forget, forgive,  
for who may say that Christmas day  
may ever come to host or guest again.  
Touch hands.  

 —William Henry Harrison Murray

When I lived in Alaska we would often roam the main concourse at Anchorage International Airport at night. You didn’t need a ticket for a flight or a reason to be there. We went because it was a place that you could walk around in in the dead of winter in your shirt sleeves. We also went because there was a decent restaurant that served the best Monte Cristo sandwiches I’d ever tasted.

One evening, after devouring my Monte Cristo I was approached by a man maybe a little older than me. He asked my group about the need for a proper ID and something about an airline-issued half-fare card. I think the man might have been Dale Lavon Thomas who on the next day, and at gunpoint, hijacked a Wien Consolidated Airlines 737. He demanded to be flown to Havana. A flight attendant on her first solo trip persuaded the hijacker to return to Anchorage to let off the passengers. The plane then headed for Vancouver before flying on to Mexico City with a flight plan ending in Havana. Dale, sometime mid-flight, had decided he wanted a larger, long-range jet and returned to Vancouver where he was arrested by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police inspector.To a Hijacker who Left this Morning I I saw you I think, it was last night and alone your gentle voice, and soft, asked us, our friends, on the value of proper ID for the use of a borrowed but not possessed half-fare card and you were gentle but alone and perhaps I caught some energy from you. I don’t know what your business was so late at the airport and all you said was that you’ll have the bread by morning and could leave. And now I hear the plane has gone to Cuba and I know it was you, don’t ask me how but maybe your questions or maybe you and your gentle voice, and soft, gave you away, but I know. II Seems like things weren’t going your way seems like you don’t always get what you want seems like you’ll never get up and seems like it’s always over but mostly it never really began. Well, friend, I feel for you. —October 18, 1971

To a Hijacker who Left this Morning

I
I saw you I think, 
it was last night and alone 
your gentle voice, and soft, 
asked us, our friends, 
on the value of proper ID
for the use of a borrowed 
but not possessed half-fare card
and you were gentle but alone 
and perhaps I caught some energy from you.

I don’t know 
what your business was 
so late at the airport 
and all you said was that 
you’ll have the bread by morning 
and could leave.

And now I hear the plane 
has gone to Cuba 
and I know it was you, 
don’t ask me how 
but maybe your questions
or maybe you and your gentle voice, and soft,
gave you away, but I know.

II
Seems like 
things weren’t going your way
seems like 
you don’t always get what you want
seems like 
you’ll never get up
and seems like 
it’s always over
but mostly it never really began.

Well, friend, I feel for you.

—October 18, 1971