ring of sand
around the pond:
cooked down by Summer.
Pond Level: Summer [Haiku]
2

two little kittens
crawl the undercarriage
of a dump-truck.
There was a famed Georgian vintner
who thought about wines all winter –
as he thought, he drank,
and -- let us be frank –
he became less vintner than drinker.
There was a colorblind decorator in Germany
who couldn’t tell crimson from ruby from burgundy.
Where precision rules
this was less than cool.
Customers saw red as far as the eye can see.
There was an old man from China
who thought he was having angina,
but it was the Kung Pao --
with peppercorns for WOW! --
that gave heartburn to the old man of China.
There was a young man from Singapore
who worked at the docks as a stevedore.
It was a good income,
’til he spit out his gum,
and the cops came knocking at his door.
What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?
I’m not sure whether this prompt is directed toward the culture of my ancestors (Irish) or the culture in which I was raised (American.) If it is the former, then the answer is certainly the great literary and poetic talent that was born of the culture (i.e. Yeats, Wilde, Shaw, Heaney, Beckett, Joyce, etc.) But if it is the latter, then it is certainly the great literary and poetic talent that was born of the culture (i.e. Whitman, Poe, Hemingway, Hughes, Twain, Dickinson, Faulkner, etc.)