Wordtreasure

Perfume

Christmas was coming.
I walked into J.J. Newberry,
the five and dime on Huntington Drive,
and approached the perfume counter.
The saleslady could see
I didn’t have a lot to work with.
She tried to fit quality to my budget
by showing me a tiny container
of a popular brand.
I was not impressed.
I pointed to a larger rectangular bottle
with very pale blue glass.
The price was four dollars.
I put my money down
and left the store
feeling good about myself.
On Christmas morning,
Mother opened my gift
of cheap perfume from the five and dime
and made a great show
of thanking me for my kindness.
“It’s the thought that counts.”

NOTE: This poem is from my book Bud and Mary, which was just released on Amazon. It recalls an incident at Christmas 1951 when I was nine years old.

Contact info: davebaldwin37@gmail.com

Abraham’s Bargain

Genesis 18:16-32

The Lord is angry. I ask the Lord,
“Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?
If you are just, would that be fair?”

I stand before the Lord and ask,
“If fifty are righteous, will all be swept away?”
The Lord responds, “For the sake of fifty,
I’ll save them all.”

I am the master of the deal.
I got it down to fifty.
But then I wonder if we have that many.
I’ll bargain for a lower count.

I stand before the Lord and ask,
“If thirty are righteous, will all be swept away?”
The Lord responds, “For the sake of thirty,
I’ll save them all.”

I am the master of the deal.
I got it down to thirty.
But then I wonder if we have that many.
I’ll bargain for a lower count.

I stand before the Lord and ask,
“If ten are righteous, will all be swept away?”
The Lord responds, “For the sake of ten,
I’ll save them all.”

I am the master of the deal.
I got it down to ten.

(Slower)

Then the Lord went his way
And I returned to my place.

(Resume)

The Lord is angry. I ask the Lord,
“Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?
If you are just, would that be fair?”

I am the master of the deal.
But I knew not the hearts of men.
Even ten was a count too high.
Ten souls were a count too high.

In the end, he saved the righteous.
The children of my children fan the earth
Because he was just, he was fair.

(All on the stage face the congregation, raise their arms, smile, and shout)

I am the master of the deal!

Announcement

I uploaded three of my poetry eBooks to Amazon this week. Go to Amazon.com and select Books. In the search engine, do this: (a) Type “Bud and Mary Baldwin”, (b) Type “Inspired by Scripture Baldwin”, or (c) Type “A Pinwheeling Leaf Baldwin”

On the Bridge

Hebrews 4:12-16

The word of the Lord is an oscillating dialog
of course-corrections from the officer of the deck to the helmsman
as the helmsman utters “Aye,” repeats the command,
and turns the helm and tiller to the new heading.

Except the word is a quiet voice within
and not a person bellowing over the main.
Brothers and sisters, it connects God with man—
a constant conversation for those who choose to listen.

Cigars

Cigars evoke the stadium.
Whenever I catch the drift
of a great cigar,

I revisit the Coliseum
where you and I
would cheer the darkest team
In white America.
The tunnels reeked of smoke,
cigars especially;
today I miss the stench.

Cigars evoke for me
our best of times as father and son.
Whatever I meant to you
and you to me
in real life,
together we loved the game.

Now That I Am Dead

After reading “Evening Land” by Pär Lagerkvist

As I stooped through the low portal of death,
I saw my human fate
emptied out into a lethe.

Life’s luggage of love and hate
was left behind the wall;
the gardener burned my once-essential freight.

I asked myself if this was all.
Intelligent souls clicked like dolphins in the wind
on either side of the wall,

discerning everything. My mind
came clean; discernment whirled ahead
as soon as I was schooled by the garrulous wind.

Now that I am dead,
I know that God did not create the soul;
the soul created God instead.

Now that I am dead, I know the soul
imagined heaven straddling earth
where God was hired to rule

irascible man and iterative death/rebirth.
I dreamed of an infinite life,
a dream encoded before my birth,

because one life was not enough.
I know that paradise was once inside my head,
now that I am dead.

NOTE: I read “Evening Land” and wrote this poem over 30 years ago. It was published in 2018. We wrote book reports when we were in school. “Now That I Am Dead” is like that. There is a poignant tone of regret throughout about Lagerkvist’s loss of faith. I tried to capture his point of view here.

[haiku]

nightfall
a cricket aria,
then the chorus

Residents Only

How is this different from the deep south?
There is no “Whites Only” sign
on the front of the Orange Grove Plunge.

That’s one difference.
The sign says,
“South Pasadena Residents Only,”

and you need an official
South Pasadena resident ID card
to show at the door.

That gets you into the pool.
How do you get the official ID card?
You have to live in the city.

How do you get to live in the city
when every residential property
in the City of South Pasadena

is restricted to persons
of the Caucasian race?
The admitting person at the front desk

of the Plunge
knows this is an all-white city.
If you are a person of color,

you can’t buy a home.
If you can’t buy a home,
you can’t get an ID card.

If you can’t get an ID card,
you won’t get into the pool.
Again,

how is this different from the deep south?
There is no “Whites Only” sign
on the front of the Plunge.

NOTE: This is a memory from the year 1955 when I was 13.

You Do Not Always Have Me

John 12:1-8

The flowing lake is always filling,
but is never full.
Once there was a true sense of fullness—
of which all that now remains
is an empty print and trace.
The lake strains for completion
with waters around it—
seeking in things that are not there
the help it cannot find
in those things that are.
Instead,
there is a chronic ache
that comes from feeling incomplete.

On Mount Wilson

Mother said her father,
my grandfather, had a request.
He wanted to take a drive

up to Mount Wilson for a day
and he asked to take me with him.
Just me.

I thought that was strange,
but I said OK.
It was strange because it was rare

for me to have any alone time
with Grandfather
and to be honest

I was never that close to him
because I feared his temper.
On an overcast Saturday morning,

the two of us took the hour-long drive
from Lorain Road
to the Observatory grounds.

Both of us were familiar
with the telescope
and the public access area

surrounding it,
so we strolled to the edge
of the mountaintop

overlooking the Los Angeles basin.
It occurred to me
this is what he really wanted to do:

look down on the City of Los Angeles.
It was early afternoon
and by now the morning fog

was a layer of unsightly smog
two thousand feet thick
pressing against the San Gabriel Mountains

with only the higher hills of the basin
poking out into the clear air.
There was nothing to see,

but he just stood there
for the longest time,
looking to the south and talking to me.

Somehow, Grandfather found it comforting
to look to the south and talk to me.
Three months later, Grandfather was dead.

Christmas 1958. Grandfather shares a happy moment with his grandchildren.

The Drifters

Their lyrics sealed the promise
of August of ’59,
There goes my baby
movin’ on down the line.

I had a brown-eyed sweetheart
when I was seventeen.
Our worlds were far apart
and the Drifters fell between.

The mournful whine is silent;
the booming drum is dead;
the song has lost its power
except inside my head.

Would I be very different
from others turning gray
who marry good companions
and never rue the day

when I riffle through my files
where the dead events belong
and turn aside discretely
to touch a treasured song?

Owl Love

Sometimes on my morning run,
I hear the call and response
of two owls.
They move around,
never in the same place twice,
but I know who they are
because the smaller of the two
is one white note higher
on the keyboard,
and each has a pitch
always the same.
No one owl initiates the call
every time.
They take turns.
The 2-hoot call is followed
by a two-Mississippi wait
for the 2-hoot response,
then they take 15 seconds
to think about it
before the next exchange.
I imagine both
are saying the same thing:
“I am yours.
I am here for you.”

[haiku]

pan-fried trout
I learn something new
about my father