Bill Graeser, a Long Island native, has worked as dairy farmer, carpenter, teacher of Transcendental Meditation and is currently the Locksmith at Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa. Published in “North American Review,” “Michigan Avenue Review,” “Lyrical Iowa,” “Chiron Review,” the “Long Island Quarterly” and “This Enduring Gift.”
Corn
Your syrup is everywhere—
in soda, tomato sauce, straw-
berry jam, and in the blood
and bodies of those who feast
round-bellied from super-
market shelves.
But a poem is not made from
corn syrup, but from fields
sown with sunlight
where roots follow the religion
of rain, the sacrament of soil,
and if corn could speak
it would say—“Stand with us
here, stretch out your arms
in the Sun…
and tomorrow we'll laugh
in the rain.”
Stupid Hole
Are you in Stupid Hole?
I hope not.
Which unlike chipmunk
or snake hole is not in
the ground but in the head.
From where one looks out
and does not see what is there
but something else, something
misconstrued by the dark
behind the eye.
Then there are those who promote
Stupid Hole—erect a flag
beside it, offer free beer,
and there are those who say:
“Come out, look around,
that is the sky, this the blissful
Sun, and so what
if the last thing we want
is free beer.”
Water
We who turn the faucet,
who flush, know less
what water is.
Who cross the bridge
by the factory
in cars and trucks,
who carry an umbrella
when even a single
cloud.
We are the ones
who need sit in the rain,
bathe in the river,
haul buckets from the well
that we, like the lake,
know water.