Black Banner in Route to Tabarsi

How lovely our long suffering;
Our slow and painful deaths.

-         C. S. Cholas
                  Journal entry
                             Vieques, Puerto Rico
                 April 2, 1983

 

Wyoming – South Dakota State Line, May 1974

 

Desolate flats, some said, a vast grassland cleared of buffalo
To make room for a giant rabbit reserve.
(Maybe barrenness is what we deserve.)
Here Wyoming and South Dakota intertwine;
Where wind commands the seasons, pollen, and snow.
Still sacred to many as a godsend divine;
If an endless prairie is a windfall for all,
Then we are in heaven and wind is our brother,
Where, if the welcome signs did not greet us
We would not have known one state from another.

                                 -- C. S. Cholas, May 4, 1974

 

A Day in the Life of America in the Time of the Pandemic

The afternoon deployments of Coca-Cola semis
Depart from the truck yard in the time of pandemic.
I watch from the empty hotel parking lot as they pass:
The long, red trucks; reinforcements headed
For the front lines of the battlefields of a thirsty America
Now relegated to third class by a virus embedded in its soul.

A rare jet passes overhead, with few seats filled,
As the news says few are flying during this global ill
We, too, sit and wait for our chance to escape.
We expected to head north by the first day of Spring.
A late snow and the virus killed our plans to run away.

Life abruptly stopped.  Time lingers on
In its time-honored way,
Though much slower than yesterday
Which moved slower than the day before
And so on into the hurried past.
Why did we move so fast?
How cluttered our lives used to be.
Now we stretch with wonder.
Was all the rush just a blunder?

To pass time, I take a daily stroll outside our Days Inn door
For an intake of Vitamin D.
How barren and lonely a vacant parking lot can be.
It conjures up a ghostly air,
As the eerie hum of a gentle breeze
Whispers in my ears, the reckoning’s near.

Today’s sunlight sprays a sense of strange hope about to begin:
Something great and powerful in the quiet dawn hovers here.
       Perhaps Christ coming down in the clouds,
       yet there are no clouds today.
Should Christ appear now, it would only be in the minds of men.
The trees celebrate the cleaner air.
Birds replace the drone of planes with confident melodies.
The sky is bright, the earth is fair.

Yet in this rare dream there is also fear.
That hails the Promised Day is near.

-         C. S. Cholas
January 1, 2020 Tempe, Arizona

 

 

 

 

Minnesota Sunday

Church steeples rise above the rich brown of wealthy ground

      All the corn is gone on the Milwaukee Hopper

Raise the golden ears to listen to Sunday praises
     And send it to the produce pews of the world.

Sing Preston, Minnesota hymns to the Sunday
    Twilight drive through green and spring gold bar
Melodies and dairy songs as we ride
    To Harmony in glory near silos and steeples.

Minarets call protestant believers, silhouetted in evening prayer,
    To share their share, as ushers pass baskets,
Pew to pew, hand to hand
    Against the cloud-streaked skyline.

Passing a low place by a stream, Max Weber’s
     Shadowy figure can faintly be seen
     Walking among the trees.

                                          -         C. S. Cholas, May 5, 1974.

Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economist, who is regarded as among the most important theorists of the development of modern Western society.
Understanding the genesis of capitalism (in contrast to Marx's historical materialism).[i] Weber would first elaborate his theory in his seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), where he attributed ascetic Protestantism as one of the major "elective affinities" involved in the rise of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state in the Western world.[20] Arguing the boosting of capitalism as a basic tenet of Protestantism, Weber suggested that the spirit of capitalism is inherent in Protestant religious values.[20] Protestant Ethic would form the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religion, as he later examined the religions of China and India, as well as ancient Judaism, with particular regard to their differing economic consequences and conditions of social stratification. In another major work, "Politics as a Vocation", Weber defined "the state" as an entity that successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory".[21] He would also be the first to categorise social authority into distinct forms: charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. Among these categories, Weber's analysis of bureaucracy emphasized that modern state institutions are increasingly based on the latter (rational-legal authority).

After contracting Spanish flu, he died of pneumonia in 1920, aged 56. Wikipedia

 

 

Evening Pearl over Iowa

Two, thin, finger-like white clouds approach the full moon

        As if to grasp a crystal pearl.

A slight westward swirl of evening air,

        Keeps their fingertips from touching that lunar sphere.

As the sure moon gradually climbs
       The empty sky over Iowa nightfall.

                                        -         C. S. Cholas, May 5, 1974

 

Del Norte

Crossing the Rio Grande, a narrow thread of water here,
There was little time to dwell on its enduring life,
Or think of its crystalline source at Creede,
Or its long path to through Tewa and Tiwa-touched red earth
South to touch the shores of Mexico and the mighty gulf.

No, there was no time to ponder the meaning of life,
Its often-brutal course and vibrant rebirths over and over again.
We take in a slim glimpse at Del Norte, and head on
To the business of things we think we need.

Chris S. Cholas -- May 2, 1974 

 

 

A Few Tourist Moments in the Black Hills

Winding roads around this ponderosa playground played up
To obscure scars of horse-days battles, bloodbaths
Over stolen lands still traumatized by miners sucking veins
Of Mother Earth for her gold jewelry.

The tragic stain of intruders’ quest for furs and gold
In the deception of uniforms and guns blurs
Any respectable outcome to hold on to. 

We wander along placard-bombarded streets and highway
Of magic traps that beg to show us caves and strange wonders.
We pass signs of battle sites that document the wounds
The crushed endured in the blunders of the swindlers.

We glimpse an injured biker and later view the carvings
On Mount Rushmore blatantly showing the stone busts
Of four victors of the land they swore to conquer.
We ignore the signboard eyesores and head eastward
With sunset cooking at our backs. 

-         C. S. Cholas, May 4, 1974