Three Poems by Gerard Sarnat:Rainy Day Birds and Bees Schedule, A Sixty Year-Old's Pre Yom Kippur Willies, La Honda Winters

Rainy Day Birds and Bees Schedule

Earlier this now cold clouding-over morning,
sun-fueled hormones and the threat of rain
drove two pair of loudly screaming recluse gold finches
down from the chimney, insane in manic deeds
of wild oak forest soaring, seed gathering and planting.

Later, inside our old weathered A-frame,
while sitting pleasurably by the roaring fire,
I glimpsed a third proud couple beat its Sunday wings best
then settle, resting quietly, nesting on hopeful egg laurels, maybe
dreaming of spring babies in muted drizzly Mother's Day celebration.

A Sixty Year-Old's Pre Yom Kippur Willies

      As a smug know-it-all kid,
a conceited teen imagining having it all -- easily and my way,
my contaminated blood teemed
   with unhygienic ruthless minute-by-minute ambition,
schemed reamed creamed screamed blasphemed used refused
strived connived screwed with all human kindness deemed unworthy,
         swam upstream (downstream if needed),
                          changing horses or teams midflow
depending on the PC regime of the moment, casually redeeming
        longtime friendships -- good and loyal bright sunbeams,
for more urgently seductive glimmers of dark steamy moonbeam shadows.

        I was supremely arrogant, overbearing, pig-headed,
     brimming with too much self-esteem, crammed with delusion
(quite likely just a very extreme variation on the usual theme
of haughty adolescent pipedreams manifesting unreal security);
                 while the truth deep deep inside me
             revealed the exact opposite...
     the older I get the less I know -- or so it sure seems.

La Honda Winters

As the weather wettens, foresty hot tubbing gets better.
I join my mermatron for our morning's fifteen minutes together.
We bubble on and on, spouting about all the kidlings we've spawned.

Afterwards, I clean the algaed water, sprinkling in a little fish food,
before leaving her to her ecstasy: on these sunny clear
Northern California days, only a net can pry my mate out.

Copyright 2008, Gerard Sarnat. © This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.

Gerard Sarnat splits time between his San Francisco Bay Area forest home and Southern California's beaches. He graduated from Harvard College, Stanford Medical School, and did his post-doctoral training at Harvard and Stanford. He is a father of three, physician to the disenfranchised, past CEO and Stanford professor, and virginal writer 'til the recent tender age of sixty-two. Gerry has been published or is forthcoming in print and electronic literary journals internationally including EZAAPP, The Hiss Quarterly, Pens on Fire, Poets Against War, Thieves Jargon, Underground Voices, Flutter, Jack, Atavar, Wilderness House Review, Aha!Poetry, Spindle, Defenestration, Black Zinnias,The Furnace Review, Stonetable Review , Bird and Moon, LoudPoet, and SoMa among others. Just Like the Jones', about his experience caring for Jonestown survivors, was solicited by The Jonestown Annual Report and will appear later this year. He is currently working on an epic prose poem, The Homeless Chronicles. He has been accepted into a four person writers' cooperative by The California Institute of Arts and Letters; Pessoa Press plans to publish his first book.