After my St. Francis House Poetry Group
where providence has magically provided
two Jamaicans
one now a 70 year old teacher
who got his education at Boston University
only to be almost destroyed
by the “desegregation” of the Boston Public Schools
and the other a young man now just 24
attempting to get his G.E.D.
after having dropped out of N.Y. Technical
for the wild, wild streets of America
I go to sit in meditation before work
under the Cherry trees on the Boston Common
from our sister city Kyoto
planted by my old poetry buddy, Jack Powers
who started Stone Soup and the St. Francis poetry groups
and I still limping a bit from a poetry contest I dared to enter
but now can see I could never win
because even the leftist radicals are so lost in the sin
of fighting to remain superior
way up there on top the world system
while we , we are way down here just waiting, waiting for the sun
to finally warm the Artic air and for the light to enliven the brown grass
so that the blossoms, the blossoms may hatch from their husks
and the petals, the petals spread their flowers to devour the great blue feast of sky.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.