Updates, as 'twere

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snNPZ4MKQBI

from the sublime (the 7th annual IBICUS workshop hosted at our school, above) to the ridiculous (the poem below), it's been a rather full week. Great to have other Symposia postings to deepen our Lenten season.

        Diet of Worms

Things bewilder, early on:

cousins who lived in Palatine

were not on Arafat’s mind

to free them from suburban

confines of Chicago; similarly,

the man called Dr King was

little like the guy who tocked

my knee to check for reflex,

ultimately fine. But my dad

enjoyed the time I mistook

the kernel of my middle name

for Martin Luther King, Jr,

as proudly I proclaimed to

whomever visited us that day.

I’m remotely ‘Martin’ for

my grandpa’s middle name,

then, more or less remotely,

for the one who stood before

the Diet of Worms, and thus

the circling of squares today.

Our retriever has a bout of

roundworm, not so bad as

these things go (his diet has

slackened, but he doesn’t

seem bewildered. Even so);

we’re at the vet, his church of

choice, inquiring how in hell

this fate befell—we feed him

like a king, a quasi Lear who

called out those who called 

him ‘everything’, cognizant

a cur like ours will die in no

time, not to say he’ll soon be

nothing. Those roundworms,

after all, have no purveyor 

of their lives, no one to bring

them to a vet, except in vials

of antiseptic, to hope to kill

eternity…of worms…tocking

the Martin Luthers in us all.