Second Night Spaces

Our second night together
In not too many years
Our love, so long enduring,
So chaste and pure unless you count
The thousand or so lascivious thoughts
Coursing through my mind:
O! to wake up more entangled 
Than entranced!  But a treasure
Such as ours is not so lightly
Changed, and what pure bliss
To wake to coffee, to walk, to dream,
To reminisce of all those times
When we stumbled, fell,
Gave our hearts for breaking,
Tortured our minds with questing,
Laughed with sorrow, cried with joy,
And we were here, each other,
For each other, loving each other, 
Offering our arms in hugs
That say it’s okay that we
Don’t always understand.
You, so tolerant of my mistakes,
Must see in me something like
The wisdom, beauty, courage that I see
In you for each of one thousand five hundred
Days and two nights.
Can I -- dare I try? -- to fill a part of
The “If I’m so wonderful...” empty
Spaces over which you give lament?
Dare I say what you might not believe,
That you are still -- have always been -- 
My picture of not quite perfection?
There still aren’t words, even in
This “Precise, Extra-Fine” pen to
Say what I have tried to know
For fourteen hundred ninety eight
Of fifteen hundred nights.
In my dreams, I finally work it out
On a porch, in an old rocker,
By your side in the twilight --
But by then I have no empty space,
And it need not be said.

Ron – 08 Jul 1993

Every gun that is made…

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower, From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953