a night in verse :: michael hathaway

Posted on 16. Feb, 2012 by Carrie in muse

words > IRIS OWENS-RIGG
poetry > MICHAEL HATHAWAY

Michael Hathaway lives in central Kansas with a house full of cats (all spayed/neutered & spoiled rotten). He works as curator for his county historical museum and is founder and publisher of Chiron Review literary magazine, currently on hiatus. He’s had more than 300 poems appear in literary journals and anthologies and has published 10 books of poetry and 1 of prose. (Most are available at chironreview.com or Amazon.com.)

ABOUT HEAVEN

If there are any heavens,
I’ll get one –not because my life was saintly,
or I did everything I “should” have done,
or didn’t do what I “shouldn’t” have done,
or believed a bunch of crap, or didn’t –
but simply that every soul who suffers
this clumsy, tragic material mess
deserves a heaven.
I’d choose a simple heaven,
a small wood frame house way out in the country,
where it’s always spring or autumn,
with rolling grass that is never mowed,
lots of trees in the distance
and a stream nearby.
The soul of every cat I ever knew will live there,
two rabbits named Melba and George,
two hens named Henny Penny and Penelope Beaker,
and five big rowdy dogs.
They’ll all get along famously.
There will be no telephones,
televisions or computers,
no automobiles or cowboys,
no religion, guns or money,
no sovereign boundaries,
no municipal laws or dreaded sickness,
no fleas or cat diseases.
There will be no people at all, except Mom
and a friend to visit now and then –
but they will be carefully screened –
and may not be
who they think they are.

WHAT THE CALENDAR DIDN’T TELL ME

The calendar told me that today the sun was in Scorpio,

the new moon was in conjunction with Uranus in Capricorn;

that Venus in Scorpio was square to Mars in Leo

and the moon in Capricorn was squared to Saturn in Libra.