Poetry

By

Don Krieger

Great Salt Lake

Epistle to James Comey

I walked onto the water an inch deep over a salt crust stride upon stride.

Was the Dead Sea like this in His time?

Did fish wash up salted for the hungry?

Could He silence the stories of the desperate?

Did He understand what the lies meant for us two thousand years later?

Did those stories appear to be pertinent?

Did he not know the significance but feel an obligation?

Did He know that the lies could bring fire or flood as we do today?

When there was news on the front page

On Sunday I read Popeye and Dick Tracey,

then waited for Captain Midnight and Sky King on TV.

Dad talked about the less fortunates.

The break ins and house fires were always in colored town.

They were like Rochester from Jack Benny, Stymie from The Little Rascals,

not like us, though we had no heat, no coats, and were always hungry.

It was different that our money went for Dad’s plane and his women.

One day, the Cuban missile crisis happened.

Bombers flew over every few minutes;

trucks ran down Dixie Highway for days

so it was hard to cross on my bike to get to school.

We had no basements;

once I dug a hole in the front yard and it quickly filled with salt water.

In school there were drills; we walked in line to the first floor closets to cower.

I felt the same a decade later

when I thought we could use nukes on those mountain bunkers in Vietnam.

So many feel that fear now, about North Korea, Iran, Russia.

Yet what is actually happening?

No one has used a nuke in 70 years,

and then it was us.

Don Krieger

I have built satellites, worked in the operating room, been in a cult, …

I earn my living as part of a group which is trying to understand and treat head injury.

In my poetry and short blog pieces, I want to express ideas with unambiguous clarity and intensity.

I willingly sacrifice rhyme and meter, art, cleverness, elegance, and beauty for these.