J.K. Durick- Two Poems

                         Reading History

It’s quite a story we’ve told ourselves about ourselves,

Filled with foolishness and heroism, mirth and squalor,

Good guys and bad. We were that second ruler in the

Third dynasty who killed his brother to get the job and

Was done in by his mother for compromising his sister.

We were Alexander running out of worlds to conquer,

We crossed Rubicon after Rubicon, watched them sail

West, joined Crusades, and found cures. We blessed

Troops going into battle and our dead afterwards. We

Invented and built, bombed and restored. Our story

Tells of egos as big as Bonaparte’s, as small as a saint’s;

It finds the bodies we hid and our kindness mid-disaster,

The mountains we climbed and the forests we leveled.

History walks us through our many selves, points out

The times we failed and the times we didn’t, admits to

Weaknesses and shortcomings, tells what we have done,

Makes us memorize things we did, tests us over and over:

Who did this, who did that, how many were there and how

Many were left after what we did what we did? History is

A frightening tale that builds itself all around us as we read,

We are trapped in this new chapter, stuck between these

New pages, ink barely dry, drying as we speak, as we guess

About what’s next and what we will think of ourselves

When we read about us then.

         Going Home

 

The floor tilts and turns

angles away, jars and jolts,

then begins to sway.

 

This isn’t the way

It’s supposed to be.

Now, when it’s me

 

in this slant

in this humbling, stumble 

this tumble and toss

that time has done

to me.

 

Distances blend it

lend it a bit of grace,

a bit of humor

it doesn’t deserve.

 

Up close when I’m part

of it, it loses the laugh

I know, I can hear.

 

The stairs catch me

stretch and bend

ask me to sit a bit,

take the load off,

but the mind doesn’t

work that way

at least, not today.

 

How do rooms lose

their shape, like this?

What happened to the door?

 

When did light become

This flow, this river

I can’t swim in, anymore?

J. K. Durick is presently a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Literary Juice, Napalm and Novocain, Third Wednesday, and Common Ground Review.