Even Mother Theresa

A poem for a soldier 

Even Mother Theresa 

has chipped a nail every so often.

And Gandhi

with a splinter logged in his

left thumb, 

still found time to practice non-violence.

Virginia Woolf, 

in the early stirring morning 

between four walls

gave advice on how to live if you 

wish to really live; or 

how not to if you don't.

Quotes by Fitzgerald about ladies and

femininity, times and truth

and Austen's views on men.

I stand somewhere in between it all today;

thinking about the iconic ages and 

the day-to-day crossroads.

My mind jumps to an American soldier.

He could be my brother.

His bags packed, hiking twenty 

miles of Arabian desert only to get home.

I wonder what his thoughts are, 

"I can't even remember what a hot shower feels like?"

Still, Marilyn blew kisses, 

Churchill drank coffee, 

Kafka wrote vignettes, 

And I'm sure some nights, even Buddha thought 

laying his head down for sleep, 

"Man! I could have really stepped up my game today!"

We circle round, 

as a resilient flock.

Circumnavigate one another all day, every day.

Living out the same lessons over time.

passing down wisdom, tradition and 

recycling the same coffee stained photo album from

one generation to another.

Like a life line reaching out, I try to extend my 

arms out to you. 

Yet once again,  

the sticato of a Miles Davis' sax retreats, 

and pulls me back.

It's quiet beneath the soldiers' boot sole.

Halfway past the desert he is now back 

in his home in a N.J. suburb.  In the bedroom he grew 

up in, he will sleep well tonight.

The telescope is still set up near the window and 

the microscope is perfectly placed on a 

desk he has long outgrown.

Whose to say that a revolution can't begin

with a hangnail, a splinter, a kiss?