Brian Kates
Rendition of Brian by his grandson, Ezra B. Mundy.
Bio: Brian Kates, a longtime newspaperman, holds many awards for journalistic excellence, including a Pulitzer Prize, George Polk Award and Daniel Pearl Award for Investigative Reporting. His book, The Murder of a Shopping Bag Lady, a saga of modern American homelessness, was a finalist for Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award in non-fiction. Recent poetry has appeared in Third Wednesday, Common Ground Review, Spirit Fire Review, Ekphrastic Review and other journals. He lives with his wife in a house in the woods in the lower Hudson Valley.
Fallow
God forbid a dandelion dare show its wooly head orcrabgrass claim an inch of the manicured green half acreon which this tidy house is set: white siding, redvinyl shutters, tiny pillared porch. A perfect, sterile box.
A Ford pickup in the driveway, a shiny Chevy in the garage, a backyard set of swings, a child’s slide, a net for playing badminton.The neighbor’s house, identical. Next door, the same. And on and on, like crosses on the graves at Arlington.
Right here is where the farmhouse stood before the fertile fields were fallowed and carved into the checkerboard on which these fortyhouses sit. Its porch looked out to waving wheat and beyond that,as far as you could see, row on row of green corn, eight feet high if an inch.
A decade before Lincoln took office, strong men with ax and sawcleared the oak and hickory that owned this land before them, and straining oxen wrenched the stumps up one by one, then pulled the plow to carve furrow for the seed.
Here, a century and more of births, baptisms, weddings, infidelities,divorces; deaths from age, illness, drink, lightning strikes, tractor rollovers; unfathomable acts of God. Each year, a family picnic with noisy games of horseshoes, beer and laughter and festering grudges.
And in the barn, sunlight. It streamed through vents and cracks likesearchlights aimed by God; fork-tailed swallows swooped like angelsin the hayloft’s grain-gold motes; incense of age, alfalfa, red clover,procreation and manure. Cassocked bats prayed in the rafters. And so did I.
A Ford pickup in the driveway, a shiny Chevy in the garage, a backyard set of swings, a child’s slide, a net for playing badminton.The neighbor’s house, identical. Next door, the same. And on and on, like crosses on the graves at Arlington.
Right here is where the farmhouse stood before the fertile fields were fallowed and carved into the checkerboard on which these fortyhouses sit. Its porch looked out to waving wheat and beyond that,as far as you could see, row on row of green corn, eight feet high if an inch.
A decade before Lincoln took office, strong men with ax and sawcleared the oak and hickory that owned this land before them, and straining oxen wrenched the stumps up one by one, then pulled the plow to carve furrow for the seed.
Here, a century and more of births, baptisms, weddings, infidelities,divorces; deaths from age, illness, drink, lightning strikes, tractor rollovers; unfathomable acts of God. Each year, a family picnic with noisy games of horseshoes, beer and laughter and festering grudges.
And in the barn, sunlight. It streamed through vents and cracks likesearchlights aimed by God; fork-tailed swallows swooped like angelsin the hayloft’s grain-gold motes; incense of age, alfalfa, red clover,procreation and manure. Cassocked bats prayed in the rafters. And so did I.
Ossuary
The timeless soil, keeper of bones,fears not harrow nor plow nor gravedigger’s lacerating mattock.
It knows no pleasure, no pain. It feels no sorrow, no joy. It does not want or care or dream or lust.
Through parching sun and rampant rainand shroud-white death of snowit takes and waits, and each spring resuscitates
It knows no pleasure, no pain. It feels no sorrow, no joy. It does not want or care or dream or lust.
Through parching sun and rampant rainand shroud-white death of snowit takes and waits, and each spring resuscitates
