July 1, 2025: “Looking at Them Asleep,” Approaching Independence Day, “Doing Laundry”

Greetings, faithful disciples!

Yes, it is the first day of July, and that means that the United States will be celebrating Independence Day shortly.  (For my international readers, July 4th is when United States’ citizens honor our declaration of independence from British rule.  Ostensibly, we gather and honor the fact that we live in a free, democratic society.  I know, I know.  Don’t get me started.).  

This year, it’s a little difficult for me to get on board that red, white, and blue train.  So much of what is happening right now in the United States doesn’t resemble independence at all.  The National Guard and Marines patrolling the streets of Los Angeles.  Immigrants and citizens being kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured.  Congress passing bills that gut some of our most important social programs (Medicare, Medicaid, and food assistance).  And a president hell-bent on transforming the country into the Fourth Reich and starting a war in the Middle East.

Therefore, you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not being all Yankee Doodle in this post.

In my personal life, there’s lots of upheaval and change headed in my direction, as well.  My family home where I grew up has been sold, and my sisters are moving to another town about 60 or so miles away.  My son is going to be a high school senior this September.  And my daughter is relocating downstate with her significant other to attend medical school.

Longtime disciples of this blog (and longtime friends) know that I don’t deal well with change.  I’m the kind of guy that always eats the same things for breakfast and lunch.  One way to ruin my day is abruptly changing plans.  However, I am a realist, and I accept that time and circumstances alter life.  U.S. Presidents lose elections.  Countries go to war.  Parents die.  Kids grow up.  

Sharon Olds contemplates her daughter and son . . . 

Looking at Them Asleep

by: Sharon Olds

When I come home late at night and go in to kiss them,
I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,
her mouth a little puffed, like one sated, but
slightly pouted like one who hasn't had enough,
her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the
iris around to face the back of her head,
the eyeball marble-naked under that
thick satisfied desiring lid,
she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion,
and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,
one knee up as if he is climbing
sharp stairs, up into the night,
and under his thin quivering eyelids you
know his eyes are wide open and
staring and glazed, the blue in them so
anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his
mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb
and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled
and pale, his fine fingers curved,
his hand open, and in the center of each hand
the dry dirty boyish palm
resting like a cookie. I look at him in his
quest, the thin muscles of his arms
passionate and tense, I look at her with her
face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,
content, content—and I know if I wake her she'll
smile and turn her face toward me though
half asleep and open her eyes and I
know if I wake him he'll jerk and say Don't and sit
up and stare about him in blue
unrecognition, oh my Lord how I
know these two. When love comes to me and says
What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.

When I read this poem today, I was struck by that question love asks:  What do you know?  

I’m not sure how to answer that query.  I know that I don’t like broccoli or MAGA Republicans.  Given a choice, I know I wouldn’t watch an Adam Sandler movie or read a James Patterson novel.  These are indisputable facts about me.  I also know my daughter and son, or, in the words of Olds, this girl and this boy.  

Yet, even with what I know, change steps in and fucks things up.  This girl and this boy will eventually have lives of their own, shared with people I may (or may not) like.  My family home will soon belong to a different family, and they will make their own memories there.  President 47 will eventually leave office, be impeached, or die.  These are certainties.

In a little over a week, I will be caravanning across the Upper Peninsula and the Mackinac Bridge with my immediate family—wife, daughter, son, daughter’s significant other and his parents.  It’s not a road trip that I’m particularly looking forward to because, at the end of it, I will be turning around and driving home, leaving my daughter behind to chase her dreams.  I know tears will be shed all ‘round.

A good change that will break my heart a little.  My kids are amazing, and I know that the future is in good hands because of them.  I just wish that love didn’t hurt so much sometimes.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about taking a road trip, based on the following prompt from June 18 of The Daily Poet:

For this poem, take a drive down a specific road, turnpike, throughway, or highway.  Stop at a cafe or restaurant and take notes about what you see, the conversations you overhear, the bumper stickers and the logos on semis and mobile homes.  Fashion a poem from your road trip notes.

Doing Laundry

by: Martin Achatz

The day is fresh as clean sheets,

grass and trees green, full of summer.

Everyone in the laundromat looks

like Russian peasants in a David

Lean film, grim, focused only on

detergent and spin cycles.  Trucks

line the parking lot, windows opaque

with sunlight, we proletarians shackled

to our agitating towels, underwear, socks,

dreaming of sliding behind our steering

wheels, turning keys in ignitions, and

cruising, baby, windows down, radio

cranked with John Prine or The Boss,

power lines scooping the sky up

and down as we hurtle toward Enchanted

Highway or Carhenge or Spotted Lake,

places where we don’t worry about

hots, colds, delicates, heavily soiled,

where we gather our collective lint, sculpt

it into the Statue of Liberty, stand

before it, immigrants on the deck 

of a ship steaming into New York Harbor,

waiting to be welcomed like long-lost

cousins from the old country.

May 25, 2025: "Looking at Them Asleep," Nephew, "Last Advice to the High School Graduate"

It is the time of year for change.  The trees are greening, and the lawn mowers are droning.  The days a stretching out, and fewer and fewer nights involve frost.  Pretty soon, the last bells of the schoolyear will be ringing, and kids will be set free for a few months to work at McDonald's, try to score beer outside party stores, and start preparing for college.  And it's time for parents to let go.

Sharon Olds writes about her kids . . . 

Looking at Them Asleep

by: Sharon Olds

When I come home late at night and go in to kiss them,
I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,
her mouth a little puffed, like one sated, but
slightly pouted like one who hasn't had enough,
her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the
iris around to face the back of her head,
the eyeball marble-naked under that
thick satisfied desiring lid,
she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion,
and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,
one knee up as if he is climbing
sharp stairs, up into the night,
and under his thin quivering eyelids you
know his eyes are wide open and
staring and glazed, the blue in them so
anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his
mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb
and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled
and pale, his fine fingers curved,
his hand open, and in the center of each hand
the dry dirty boyish palm
resting like a cookie. I look at him in his
quest, the thin muscles of his arms
passionate and tense, I look at her with her
face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,
content, content--and I know if I wake her she'll
smile and turn her face toward me though
half asleep and open her eyes and I
know if I wake him he'll jerk and say Don't and sit
up and stare about him in blue
unrecognition, oh my Lord how I
know these two. When love comes to me and says
What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.

Olds knows her kids, each and every hair on their heads and nail on their fingers.  That's what parents do.  They spend 17 or 18 or 19 years teaching their children how to fly, and then they open the window and watch them wing away.

My daughter will be leaving in July for medical school.  Haven't really wrapped my mind around that fast-approaching cleaving.  This weekend, my nephew graduated from high school.  I attended his ceremony on Friday, and this evening I went to his graduation party.  

It's an exciting time for young people--on the cusp of their first real tastes of adulthood.  I could see it in my nephew's eyes.  They were full of joy and excitement and hope.  That's the way it should be.  Same with my daughter.  Both of them are gazing into the future, while we parents are mourning the little boy who loved playing Angry Birds and the little girl who fell asleep to Frosty the Snowman every afternoon.  

I wish I had enough money to fund both my daughter's and nephew's educations.  I would at the drop of a hat.  (For my international disciples, I should explain that, in the United States, students have to pay to go to college.  I know, I know.  It's messed up.)  Unfortunately, poets don't make a whole lot of money, unless a Pulitzer Prize is involved, so the best I can do is offer love, support, and words.

I have no doubt my nephew and daughter are going to change the world.  They're kind and intelligent and funny.  As Olds says, I know this girl, this boy.  And I couldn't be prouder.

Saint Marty took a day off from The Daily Poet to rite this poem for his nephew . . . 

Last Advice to the
          High School Graduate

by: Martin Achatz

for Caden, May 23, 2025

I know you’re tired of all the advice:
live in the moment, choose kindness,
measure success by the number of people
who love you, follow the path that’s
overgrown and rocky. You’re weary
of all those clichés from us oldsters
who will gladly show you our scars,
name them like willful kids or
monuments on a Civil War battlefield.

Instead, I want to tell you this morning
I found a rabbit in my backyard. His black
eyes panicked, he dragged himself
over the grass, hind legs useless
as driftwood. Perhaps he was dropped
there by a hungry owl after biting
and clawing and screaming, his spine
splintered by the fist of the ground.
I wanted to help mend his broken body, 

watch him bound away into the lilac bushes.
Sometimes, though, beautiful things cannot
be fixed, and all we can do is give thanks
that we have hearts that can be broken
by suffering and tongues to sing something
sacred and tender about this fragile world
you now hold in the palm of your hand.

August 6: Father's Love, Sharon Olds, "Looking at Them Asleep"

When I can get away from my normal life, concentrate on being a husband and father fully, I sometimes feel my heart bursting open like a tulip bulb in spring.  Love sort of overtakes me when I don't have the distractions of work and bills and teaching.  When it's just me and my family.

I know I walk a fine line of sentimentality when I write about my love for my wife and kids.  "Love" is a word that should be used sparingly, along with the words "sorrow" and "weep."  Anything that smacks too much of Jane Eyre and Heathcliff and moors should be avoided as much as possible by serious writers.

However, I am going to allow myself to be a little sentimental tonight.  I am happy, in this hotel room, my wife reading a novel in bed, my daughter and son passed out in various corners of the suite.  I know what love is tonight.

Sharon Olds is not afraid to write about love, either.

And Saint Marty loves the following poem.

Looking at Them Asleep

by:  Sharon Olds

When I come home late at night and go in to kiss them,
I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,
her mouth a little puffed, like one sated, but
slightly pouted like one who hasn't had enough,
her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the
iris around to face the back of her head,
the eyeball marble-naked under that
thick satisfied desiring lid,
she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion,
and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,
one knee up as if he is climbing
sharp stairs, up into the night,
and under his thin quivering eyelids you
know his eyes are wide open and
staring and glazed, the blue in them so
anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his
mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb
and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled
and pale, his fine fingers curved,
his hand open, and in the center of each hand
the dry dirty boyish palm
resting like a cookie.  I look at him in his
quest, the thin muscles of his arms
passionate and tense, I look at her with her
face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,
content, content--and I know if I wake her she'll
smile and turn her face toward me though
half asleep and open her eyes and I
know if I wake him he'll jerk and say Don't and sit
up and stare about him in blue
unrecognition, oh my Lord how I
know these two.  When love comes to me and says
What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.

Sing with me:  "All you need is..."