Water Lilies

What are all these buildings and tall green trees on the barren landscape haunted I remember haunted with the ghosts of barracks? Does the mad bag piper still practice on a fire escape of some building as we walk through the ground fog back to Wadsworth street? Where are the matronly black ladies in cafeteria white who once worked the hot line in what is now a food court? Who’s playing Luigi’s Wednesday?

Who are these children? What future have we built for them in the last 30 years? If I knew, I would tell them but they are too busy hustling from class to class, texting that girl they met in CHEM 1069 for coffee later. A few more years of innocence left and I should not trouble them with my grey worries, but walk with them in the bustling sunshine toward some life as yet unimagined.

MONET
By Everette Maddox

The window of my half-
ass job frames a group
of students dripping
across a small yard’s
green gloom. No more
rain! Because a noose
of sunlight snares them—
skirts & hats
& army jackets–& pulls
them tight, like
a yellow slicker,
retarding their academic
progress. Fixing them
(such a lovely mess!),
making an old man’s
day immortal. Water-lilies.