The Garden of Verse: Three Poems on the Way It Was (and Sometimes Wasn't) Back in the Day

Three poems from what I might be calling my 'Retrospection Series' -- "How I Missed Woodstock," "Hunting for the Moon," and "Thunder" -- are up on the September Verse-Virtual.com. 

         Here's the bionote I wrote for V-V, attempting to connect all three of these themes to some of the 50-year anniversaries receiving wide attention this year. Because, in fact, the year 1969 was rather packed with events of historical note... And I didn't even mention that on the day of the moon launch, the top story in all the newspapers had to do with a previously little known water-crossing called Chappaquiddick.  

          Anyway, here's the note: 

          "It's been a good year for occasional verse, with 50-year anniversaries everywhere you turn. Somehow I missed the originals. I had no interest in the first man walking on the moon. I missed Woodstock, unable to get time off from a summer job I hated. I'm making up for all that here with poems about my absence from Woodstock, a more recent attempt to pay attention to the moon, and a poem in praise of Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, which I also ignored back in the day." 

            I'll reprint the Woodstock poem here: 

How I Missed Woodstock


'Uh, have you heard about --?'
Of course, everybody's heard about that
'Wanna go?'
 
Sure, you think the boss will understand
that for howsoever many days
I may disappear into a fathomless farm-belt upstate wilderness
of corn and soybeans and ultimate grasses
intended for the beasts of the field,
not for the longhaired hominids of the vinyl generation?
You have any idea where we'd park?
And how much did you say it would cost
vis-a-vis a weekly wage for picking plastic stock
in the Rubber Shrubbery warehouse?
...when we can always sit in the mud of your Mama's backyard,
turn our faces to the rain,
drink store brand cola and smoke weed
for pennies on the buck
 
'Oh... I don't know, maybe
it would be something to remember
when we're like, you know, forty years old
and looking back at our wilder days...'
 
Wild at heart, but trapped in flesh,
we save our pennies for a nearer treat,
darkening the streets of the broken city
and lamenting the death of a dream:
One green people, at home with
the geist of the zeit and the beasts of the field
 

To read my other two poems, and poems by the issue's many other contributors, please see  

http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html