14th & Main
by Robert M. Katzman
© August 7, 2017
It still glitters in my imagination
Gives me a suspended moment
Whenever
I slow down to stare at it
It is the absence of anything
The quiet vista that represented
Better times for the
New couple in town
14th & Main
First Published July 30, 2017, © by Robert M. Katzman
Sometimes, in the cool night air I walk barefoot in the dark on the geometric red and white stone paths to inspect Joy’s Garden for evil invaders. All manner of uninvited plants seek to join the selected ones. They are unaware that a different bipeded specie’s resistance to them is constant and that pulled weeds, once sun-dried, become kindling for our hungry backyard brick fireplace.
There are five blossoming brooding Burning Bushes on the east and on the west sides of the little garden, to contribute to my defenses. Soon to be a fiery glowing red, Moses would be proud. But also, he wouldn’t wonder why there were ten of them. Subtly, but meaningfully to me, they send two messages. I let them speak for themselves.
My heart is seeking a new Woman to love by Robert M. Katzman July 20, 2017
One Hundred Panes of Glass
She never saw my surprise for her
Something I designed to enchant
Her whimsical soul
My timing was off by a week
Her surprise gift arrived too late
And now, well,
She’s somewhere in Eternity
Leaving me suspended in Time
Copyright June 20, 2017 by Robert M. Katzman
A short modern Passover story about the incredible courage of a small Danish fishing village whose residents did what they could to save their Jews from the exterminating Nazis. Heroes don’t always need guns to prove what they believe is the right thing to do. The Nazi are the only plague in this tale.
Although history swiftly evaporates as first the witnesses to an event occur grow old and die and then their children die, to some people history matters very much.
Current national events in politics in the United States are riveting the attention of millions of the world’s people right now for the cartoon-like of behavior of some in this country’s government whose names need not be typed. People want to know every scrap, every detail of “who did what, when, where, why and how”, as my high school journalism teacher wayne brasler used to say to our small class.\
But only for so long.
President John F. Kennedy is in the news right now because his 100th birthday has just passed on May 29th, 2017. He was elected in November 1960 when I was ten and died by assassination when I was thirteen on November 22, 1963.
Today I’m sixty-seven and while the second incident remains vivid to me, the first one does not. The youngest person to be able to vote for JFK, as he was affectionately referred to in 1960, would have had to be twenty-one and born in 1939.
The point is even great fame doesn’t keep a name alive in popular imaginations for very long, and no fame at all means virtually instant indifference.
This short story is about a great many very brave and resolute people living in eastern Demark, a tiny country just north of Germany and west of Sweden, during World War Two.
By Robert M. Katzman, Copyright June 11, 2017:
This is a kind of a melancholy story, honestly, but not what you might be thinking.
What follows is a true but an unknown Bonnie/Joyce story, in which the villain, I truly regret…was me.
My beautiful older sister, Bonnie Sue, who, as she endlessly instructed me,was 2 years, 6 months and 8 days older than me, and who died today in 2010 at 62. Since she was born in the same year as Israel, when Bonnie turned 13, so did Israel-a unique country/human Bar Mitzvah–whose government issued a large special framed document to any boy or girl who requested it. Bonnie’s hung on the wall above her bed. It was in Hebrew, in full color and to those of us who understood the historical sequence of events, deeply moving. Even I at eleven years understood that.
Their lives shall not be forgotten while I still breathe. Their names kept alive. Bonnie and Joyce mattered to many people.
Joy’s Last Day
Joyce is gradually moving on now
To wherever we go when
That time comes for us