Traveler
My dog howls at the moon while I’m
beside the camp fire. He comes over
and tells me this story like an old pal,
as to why dogs howl in the night.
Something about paranormal activity.
And not knowing exactly how he came
to earth against his own free will. He
said, forced by humans. Though I find
it strange, my dog is good at tricks. Some
I never taught him. He said dogs are not
really howling at the moon like humans
believed. But it’s like a kind of early voice
mail searching, reaching back somewhere.
He said I won’t believe any of this stuff
by morning. It would sound too fantastic,
too distasteful as if again he was telling
me about slavery or another notorious
genocide my mind couldn’t lift.
© Stanley M. Noah
Time Line of a paradoxical life
1912
The Titanic goes down.
The Carpathia rescues survivors.
1918
The Carpathia goes down.
57 survivors, one is Frank Buckles.
1942
Buckles became a Japanese POW,
civilian internee.
2008
Frank Buckles meets President
George W Bush.
2010
Frank Buckles dies as last American
WW1 veteran, age, 110
© Stanley M. Noah
Backward, Turn Backward
Quiet in this square, stained wallpaper room, haunting low-toned
mirror and slow moving music dancing out the short ban radio. My
mind seem easily to walk backwards the steps of years. Then profoundly reality is repeating my personal history with so many persons. I lived through
their faces, voices, events like a movie. I do not need to meet them as they
are today as some memories are sacred like fresh linen folded and put away like rivers to the sea like beach bone-dried sea shells waiting for generations
to be collected. Remembered for what they were, and went like stamps on letters, traveled. Just to be put away in glass jars like red sweet jam held to sun
light. You wonder beyond yourself and with those who knew you as they are
constantly on edges, disappearing, again and again, taking a little of you with
them as if until now you had never been here, hardly lived, even known by others
today. Then fate like gravity soon has its way of placing you alone in this room
somewhere in this hour. And the mirror you look into is like an abstract image
you cannot fix. Becoming more invisible each time you take a peek. You hate
to cut the lights off. Fearing next morning the mirror can no longer hold you.
Its the quietness, isn’t it, that makes you think of these types of thoughts.
© Stanley M. Noah
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