Poetry: Selections from Nolo Segundo

The Face Of The Buddha

They haunt me still.

The little children laughing,

Always laughing.

The women voluptuous,

Languid,

Their movement an invitation.

Even the traffic policeman,

Crisp, clean in uniform,

Moving with ballerina grace

As hordes of cyclos and mopeds

And the occasional automobile

Pirouette endlessly about him,

Impatient bees made quiescent

By surreal beauty of white-gloved arms

Cutting through thick tropical air.

Everywhere was grace, gentleness—

Temples incandescent at dawn,

With ant trails of orange-robed monks

Cradling their pot-belly begging bowls.

The patient women standing by the road

To lump rice into the begging bowls,

The monks always staring blankly ahead

Until the women bowed low in reverence,

Grateful their gift of life was taken.

And how wondrous it was,

An accident in the street, yet no anger, no bile—

Forgiveness, felt before thought,

Thought before uttered.

How could such a people murder,

No not murder—slaughter!

Their mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles,

Teachers, priests, friends and children too.

Change temples of peace

Into charnel houses?

Schools of knowledge

Into abattoirs?

They photographed every butchered lamb,

Like the devil’s children on holiday,

And decorated the classroom walls,

A show-and-tell of horror and despair.

 

Why? Why?

Why such pain on such gentle people?

Why did God hide His face

While the world turned its back?

Thirty, forty, fifty years and still—

Still they haunt me.

GETTYSBURG, REDUX

Now the happy soldiers

Go to fight again the battle,

Marching bravely forty abreast

With heavy muskets shouldered,

Yelling their cries of pain and glory

As they face the cold cannon

Barking like a pack of mad dogs.

 

Down they go in ones and twos,

And sometimes in little bunches,

Collapsing together as though

Put to sleep by the fairy dust

Of long forgotten dreams.

 

Both sides feel the urge

To kill, to step the victor

O’er their brothers’ bones.

Grown men playing—yes

Even perhaps a bit silly—but

Maybe, just maybe,

Some of them are unaware

Of their own anguished deaths

There on that sweating day

Not really so very long ago.

 

At seventeen I went to that town

To talk of my education and

In the warm afternoon

I meandered mindlessly

Amidst the boulders named

Fearfully for Satan’s lair.

There suddenly, terribly,

While walking between two

Of the giant stones, my body

Shuddered, an awful shaking

That shook me to the core

Of my soul, but then I did not yet

Know we never die only once.

I Have Been To Places Of Great Death

I have been to places of great death:

Walking the battlefield of Gettysburg,

As a lusty young man of no firm belief

Who stepped between the great rocks

Of Devil’s Den and felt his soul shudder

as though he had been a soldier there,

and died in fear a long, long time ago.

 

I taught my tongue to the gentle Khmers

As civil war raged and the killing fields

Were being sown—I left before the

Heartless murdering began, the killing

Of over a million: teachers and students,

Doctors and farmers, the old, the young,

Each with a photo taken before dying,

Their pictures taped to classroom walls.

 

And when I visited Hiroshima, now myself

Chastened by death’s touch, and knowing

My soul real, knowing of meaning absolute

And of unseen forces that work good or ill,

As I stood at the first ground zero, I once

Again shuddered to feel the pull of madness

(though I knew not if it was my own or some

Remains of that evil which brought the fire

And brimstone of a world wide war….)

 

But by then I knew I could pray, and so

Opened my desperate heart and sought

His mercy—and then I saw a sort of angel,

Who took me from that place of insanity,

Healing me while we wandered by the

Beauty of the Inland Sea as my storm

Calmed and left me, never to return….  

 

I have been to places of great death, and

I have felt death’s cold, careless hands.

But I know now what death itself fears:

The Light, the light eternal which carries

Souls beyond time itself, like the winds

Of a Love exceeding all understanding.

Nolo Segundo, pen name of L.J. Carber, 75, became a published poet in his 8th decade in over 80 literary journals in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Romania, and India. A trade publisher has released two book length collections: The Enormity of Existence [2020] and Of Ether and Earth [2022]. Nominated earlier this year for the Pushcart Prize 2022, he's a retired teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia] who's been married 42 years to a smart and beautiful Taiwanese woman.