Day: March 26, 2024

Four Young Girls from Birmingham

Posted on by Bob Boyd

September 15, 1963 bombed to death in the 16th Street Baptist Church In Birmingham:
Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14) Carol Denise McNair (11).
I’ve seen their photos, read their stories – long ago,
Bright futures awaited those innocent, young girls.
Reading about them, tears fell. It was all so heartbreakingly sad.
Soulless monsters, the killers didn’t seem to care;
They didn’t seem contrite and ashamed, as they should have been.
Wondered how God could have let that happen, and in the sanctity of a church.
The only way I can reconcile their awful, unjust fates
Is that surely God must have needed four more angels in heaven.
Never forget those four young girls from Birmingham.

Bob Boyd

The Wooing of an Inscrutable Woman

Posted on by Bob Boyd

What is it going to take to woo this inscrutable woman?
Am I going to have to crawl over a hundred miles of broken glass?
Or swim the seven seas seventeen times?
Or like a gladiator of old, fight off hundreds of lions in a coliseum?
Or scale Mount Everest ten thousand times?
Good God in heaven, what on earth is it going to take?
In an attempt to make her favor sweeter,
I think I’ll start with some chocolate mousse from Harris Teeter.

Bob Boyd

8th Century Chinese Poetry

Posted on by Bob Boyd

I love 8th century Chinese poetry.
I even like their poets’ names like Li Po and Wang Wei.
They sound so cool and so exotic to me.
Those poets liked things like jade — in abundance;
They seemed to like it more than we like gold.
They liked oriole birds, and if you see one, you’ll know why
And there are eight species in the US and in Canada.
They loved the word crystalline, as in crystalline water.
In many ways their poetry is close to peerless,
Their use of imagery is phenomenal and sublime.
All of this amazes me because it was written so long ago.
And by that way, I’m not talking reading these poems
In Chinese. I know nothing of Mandarin, and I can’t
Speak Cantonese. Nor any of the hundreds of
dialects that are considered Chinese.

Bob Boyd