Tag: Dick Westheimer

Two Poems by Dick Westheimer

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Ghazal For a Fallen Nation

It’s tough when it’s all just conspiracy shit
that they’ve beamed down from the mothership.*

In America friendships are split when friends
raise the flag on the wrong color ship.

The neighbor boy whose suicide we lament
idolized his granddad’s warriorship.

My bluegrass buddy wound up on a vent,
he mistook reading Facebook threads for scholarship.

It is forbidden to speak of politics when in bed
rocking the waves of my lover’s hips.

My dad sang God Bless America at every event.
Like Irving Berlin he treasured his citizenship.

* Quote from the August 1, 2023 filing indicting former President Trump

* 

Another Fucking Poem About Insomnia

I pass the night picking digits off the clock
in ones and twos, counting cricket chirps on my fingers,
trying to remember a line from a poem I’d yet to write,

not remembering if I took out the trash. By 3 AM,
the covers strewn and sheets tangled at my knees,
my head hurts from thoughts like squirrels scritching

at each other, bounding off walls, like a thousand pingpong
balls. At four I stick the numbers back on the clock—the five
and then the six—and when the alarm goes off at seven, I am

grateful I don’t remember falling asleep. Outside my office
window the drone of bees in the hibiscus flowers drowses me,
makes me think I could nap. I can’t nap.

I don’t know how to let things happen without me—
what if I miss a breaking news headline or the flash
of that line of poetry I’ve waited for? And here it is midnight,

again, and I am afraid—to go up to bed, knowing I will be obsessed
picking those red-hot digits from the clock again. And as the bee
sleeps in the hive and the hibiscus petals

are wrapped tight for the night, I am kept awake,
listening for that drone of sleep that never comes.

*

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have recently appeared in Whale Road Review, Innisfree Journal, Gyroscope Review, Banyan Review, Rattle, Ritual Well, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and Cutthroat. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com

Three Poems by Dick Westheimer

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The Word for Darkness is Light

I went out tonight
under the lantern hung stars

took a bucket to collect
the light poured

from their quantum hearts
and drank until

I was tipsy, bewitched
by their hymns,

greedy for more,
of their secrets

which I promised
to keep.

But how can I
not tell

all who will listen
the news:

From here I can see
the dark between

the stars
and it contains

more stars.

*

The Companionship of Stars

These are the first
clear skies in ninety days.

The stars are impatient
children tugging

at my sleeve.
I tell them

they each
are my favorite

but I must choose
one to let into

the close home
of my scope.

The longer
I stay out

among them,
on the frost

breath of this
late winter night,

the brighter
each seems to shine.

They must know
about waiting well—

each hung like
an old lantern

in the shed waiting
to be lit by me

looking at it.

*

The Universe and I are Made from Shattered Space and Time

They say that space-time has
more than once, fractured

like a pane of glass,
like a block of ice run through

with cracks, like a wave
come undone on the shore,

and that at each epoch, the universe
has reformed from what remains.

And so the same for me, that I know
of my dying just by tracing my finger

along the seams of my space-time life,
like the line from my first kiss to the last,

from my firstborn child and my last grand,
all the moments I’ve cried so hard that

I shake the world like a temblor,
the hours I lay on my side, you and I

fitting like two spoons, me
saying as I have ten thousand times,

I like lying with you, and of course,
the nights like now that we’re apart.

Each is a small dying, a gift
of being alive, and here’s

the epiphany:
the end will come

when all my fault lines merge
back at their epicenter, when this

grim and shimmering world
is shattered and

out of its fragments,
the next one is formed.

*

Dick Westheimer has—with his wife and writing companion Debbie—lived in rural southwest Ohio for over 40 years. He is a Rattle poetry prize finalist. His most recent poems have appeared or are upcoming in Whale Road Review, Minyan, Gyroscope Review, The Patterson Review, Rattle, The Banyan Review, Ritual Well, and Cutthroat. His recent chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by Sheila Na Gig Books.

To Light the Whole of the World by Dick Westheimer

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To Light the Whole of the World

Tonight we set
the menorah
in the window
facing the world.

I light the first candle
which flickers feebly
against the whole of darkness.
I look from the flame

and see reflected
in the glass
my hand holding
the glowing shamash,

the helper that will light
two candles tomorrow.

*

Dick Westheimer has—with his wife and writing companion Debbie—lived on their plot of land in rural southwest Ohio for over 40 years. His most recent poems have appeared or are upcoming in Rattle, Paterson Review, Whale Road Review, Minyan, Gyroscope Review, and Cutthroat. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, poems prompted by Russia’s War on Ukraine, is forthcoming from Sheila Na Gig Books.
Website: dickwestheimer.com