One Poem

(Revised 3/22/09)

The Year of the Martini


There was the year of God,
then there was the year of the martini,

a martini finished with four small pimento filled olives.

When all is just too much, when three
more seconds is too long,
when tolerance escapes forgotten,
a martini is what’s called for.

God on the other hand
insists on chattering away about love,
how it’s our destiny, how only
through love we come to understand

how to be kind, merciful, and imagine
a Shiite boy’s shoulder in a bandage.
This boy shakes as he walks with his father
down a street, a street
that for him is an ordinary street,

the street he lives on. God keeps insisting

that we stop, that we stop
being wrong in so many ways: we hurt
those we love,
we hurt those we don’t, we hurt
people on the way home, ordinary

people whose lives we cannot fathom.
We don’t know the sidewalk,
the dirt and cracked cement;
we don’t know the gated fence, the ironwork
and grilled lattices; we don’t know the steps
leading to the front door, the shoes,
the socks, the curled skin of a pinky toe;
we don’t know all that was before

the soldiers came.