By Phil Flott
You’re not the first to go
hanging on to barbecued chicken dinners
and all the fresh French bread and pure rich butter
a cold summer beer could wash down.
You won’t be the last
to gather your children around you,
moons orbiting Jupiter,
and tell them the news their hearts know:
this cancer is robbing you of ten years.
You are just one Nebraskan
who, though he has to die,
wants to see Chimney Rock—dang—one more time,
start one last fire in some lady,
kiss her lips to life
and you two greet the sun in the pink
rising over you drinking your coffee
from your thermos at Dam Site 11,
planning on floating through that day
on your new-found white cloud.
FUNERAL MASS FOR MSGR WOLBACH
The cantor was singing Polish,
whose soft, meshed consonants stayed in my mind,
having chanted them in grade school.
During recess time of those
sunny autumn afternoons
my feet traipsed through fluttering leaves.
In class the Sisters read to us
about the Mississippi River French explorers.
My blood felt as if I already knew them.
Sr. Lambertilla didn’t discover until she died
that she had been a long-playing record
from God for me.
In the cantor’s flow of the piano-backed singing
I felt what I had known
With no help of any blackboard:
that God had transported me
from New Orleans
to South Omaha
so that these Poles
might teach me
what Msgr. Wolbach
knew all along,
that no matter how many wars
happened among us humans
we were to care for each other,
a lesson he learned ministering
on the hills of Okinawa,
an answer I was so long in un-earthing.
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Phil Flott, a retired priest, has had poems in Trajectory, Last Stanza, Raven's Perch, Vita Poetica, etc.