Lines written on the 27th minute of my lunch hour in a Wawa parking lot
As the weeks deliver blow upon dull blow
To our sophisticated, fast-paced lives,
Keeping to schedules, always on the go,
With no time for ourselves in nine-to-fives,
“Surviving” mostly means that we’ll cut corners
While settling for fixes ’stead of cures;
From drive-thru grabs to greasy touchscreen orders
Of sloppy subs, a lunch hour’s breaded snares.
And even as these hurried words truck forth
From time-stressed regions of my anxious brain,
Some sparrows make a pit stop on the earth
And bathe in dirt, too long awaiting rain;
Shake off the dust their wings accumulate,
Then dart away, with nowhere to be late.
*
Sidewalk suns
Some call them “weeds,” these yellow miracles
That pushed through stone and found a way to thrive
Amongst the rubble’d ruins of this pavement;
Amidst the cracks and root-disjointed hills
(Of concrete) that have made it hard to move
Along these lanes, so desperate for improvement.
Most call them eyesores, born to be plucked out
And ripped from where their like has taken refuge,
As if their mere existence were too much
For eyes that can’t enjoy or won’t appreciate
Their growing here; fools’ gold, but double-rich
For their vitality: so heavenly huge
To the ants that wander by each grounded sun,
Who must look up at what dull souls look down upon.
*
So much baggage
I stop to watch him slide across the gravel,
His shelly suitcase proudly on display;
Horns pointing north, the safest way to travel
About these parts on such a gloomy day.
The path that leads to my apartment steps
Doesn’t see much traffic; byways clogged with moss
And wayward weeds have slowed the sleepy progress
Of many a tiny snail. The broad, slicked tops
Of dandelions are swaying on the breeze,
As he slimes toward his goal: a patch of grass
Spring suns have turned lime-green. His casual pace
Knows nothing of the scale-tipping stress
We mortals lug around; nor can we tell
What weight of worlds he’s learned to carry so well.
*
Such rarities abound
Those rush-hour miracles we mostly miss
While speeding down the highway into work,
Unheralded lights, which mostly we’ll dismiss
As hardly being worth a second search,
Call to us from the roadside, from up high,
In scattered bunches, singularly rare;
From shadowy places, sans celebrity,
Shout to us in their silence to “inquire.”
The tiniest weed that flourishes in the cracks
(Of a corroded guardrail) beat the odds
And shows so much resilience in its flex;
And where some tulips flaunt their ivory buds,
Unbuttoning in a ditch to taste the sun,
Their swaying might just save us from the gun.
*
Luck be a ladybug
To see this good-luck creature, on a day
When nothing’s going right or going my way,
Is to have proof that there’s a real order
To the things, both great and small, that see us suffer;
Is to imagine God as one great prankster,
Forever pulling the strings that set us up
For idiot choices, love, loss, epic failure,
Elated when our best-laid futures flop.
Or could this chance encounter with a lady
(Who picked spring’s chilliest day to wear all red)
Be no more palpable than any “maybe”
That the best philosophers have all deemed dead
And pointless to proclaim as ever being,
Beyond our mortal scope or supernatural seeing?
*
James Feichthaler is a poet with roots in the Philadelphia-area residing in Trenton, NJ, where he watches the skies for UFOs, sings Irish folk songs on his porch, and drinks beers. His new book From the Back Porch of a War (Parnilis Media 2024) pulls no punches in its assessment of a politically-divided America seemingly at war with itself, searching for moral integrity in a hashtag-hardened, spiritually-bankrupt world.