L.R. Harvey Poetry

a first-year teacher the morning before You remembers the way your baseball coach, who was like a father to him, would after practice tell the team there’s pride in being the first one there and the last to leave, but he never made it sound this tiring. It’s dark as you approach the high school’s double glass doors, the renovated entrance emitting a pulsing orangish light that guides you through the faculty lot, your classroom key in hand, into the silent gaping halls your trying desperately to fill by audibly humming “This little light of mine.” You remind yourself to be aware of joy in the little things: the warmth of eighty-seven copies that slide from the sleepy printer in rhythmic drumming, the mumbled “morning” of the early student who reclines against the cobalt blue lockers, the noise the mediocre workroom coffee machine   makes, beginning to drip with life.   You know that in about an hour the curtains on this darken...

checking into another Marriott The hotel lobby plays on repeat a scene of blue-green waves exploding on sea-side cliffs like party poppers, confetti riddling the air in an ocean celebration.                                        He's  seen it many times: The way one wave will drift back into another like shifting sands to share the honor of hitting the cliff another time, another time, and always another time, as if the communal act of wrecking rock in rhythmic rolls were its God-commissioned mission.   But this time, standing in the too-long line of automated businessmen in suits who shift their weight and check their watches and roll their eyes exactly like they were programed to, he watches the automated lobby loop and he cannot help but notice...

Speed Dating in Heaven I hope in heaven there's speed dating. You laugh, for you can't help but see An over-smiling, slightly overweight Angel ringing a heavenly bell To send us off, a group of awkward floating spirits rating One another (internally) on who fits well In an angel body, who best plays The harp, and who has adapted best to being seen Again in diapers. But the dates I see are of a different kind. I see an endless room of broken people made whole, And rows and rows of tables where one by one I sit across from you and him and her, and we finally find The time we never found on earth To hear each other's stories, to talk with the goal Of truly listening instead of getting things done, To have a conversation without the dearth Of time we knew too well in earthly bodies. I'll spend an eternity with you, I'll talk forever with him, and on it goes; I hope that speed-dating in heaven is incredibly slow.

A Purpose of Poetry or On Reading a Wallace Stevens Poem This poem is nothing more to me Than inky dots on pages 125 and 6. I think I've missed the message, and all I can see Is how it's shaped like the comb my wife was using to fix Her hair at 7:16 this morning. Oh, the way a poem has Of reminding me to see the intimate moments in This intricately interconnected life we live!

This Life is a Road... ...and there’s something about a road That calls for going.                                “But where?” you ask, And I have asked the same, and I have passed A million others I know would die to know If we have found an answer: Passed them in little red roadsters zipping across The interstate in the throes of midlife crisis, in grumbling trucks Acquainted with the botoxed dancers At seedy truck-stop bars, Passed them in loaded station wagons lost Along a country road or stuck In traffic headed East or West. I’ve come to doubt this something is found in the destination, For always upon my own arrivals I sense The often subtle summons of the road to home, A summons irrespective of where I’ve arrived; I sense the asphalt invitation To go where I belong, to drive Again the roads I lo...

Word Searching "Expression is all we want." - Emerson  An empty Moleskine in hand, elbows on knees I sit on the weathered wooden bench and stare out across the evening summer frolics of Coolidge Park,                   a one-man band’s saxophonic wail wafting across the nearby bridge to drench me in the sort of thoughts nostalgics are known to think at the end of every season. A simple reason brings me to this place of self-reflection, this space and time where fading sunlight, child’s laughter, and the smell of browning leaves combine to form the frame of mind ideal for poetic creation:       The  need to write. I am a cup that’s overfull, a thread that’s over-taut, a top-heavy pod of dandelion seeds that only needs the slightest breeze of inspiration to then release to the world the multitudinous thoughts that despe...

I Represent the System               I. Based solely upon my genitalia and skin I represent the system, A fact that often seems to serves To gag my distinctive voice And label me instead another ignorant corporate cog within The corpus of corruption.                                         "I'm with them" My whiteness seems to cry, muffling for me my choice Of what to support and what to believe.         II. On hearing a certain view I shared, A woman quickly informed me yesterday That "of course you think that way, You're white and male."                                      And there I heard and personally professed The cry of minorities, of women, of all the oppressed Who clamor to be given a voice That's more than j...