His parents’ heydays
were the late 30’s and 40’s —
a romantic song and
what went wrong.
He wondered about
their worlds.
He traveled the
same nostalgic roads,
the back roads,
here and there,
the abandoned
gas stations, converted
into pubs, the road
houses resurrected,
the Glenn Miller and
Tommy Dorsey bands.
The sadness gripped
his heart as he listened
to a romantic song
and wondered what
went wrong.

His college’s name is Hope and he always
felt a bit uncomfortable with it; it just
didn’t have the ring of Yale or Princeton
or Harvard or even Thornton Jr. College.

It sounded kind of corny and is the butt
of bad jokes like, “Do you hope to graduate
from Hope?” and “There’s no hope at Hope,”
and “All those who enter here, abandon Hope.”

Clever, huh? But then he thought about the
pioneers who named the school and the struggles
that they had and how bleak life could be in
the swamp lands along the shore of Black Lake

and through it all, they hoped. That was a
hundred-fifty-years ago and the school is still
going strong. As he thinks about the bleak
conditions of global warming, islands sinking

deep into the sea, wars and rumors of wars
and all the fear and animosity, a sensation-
alism loving media, fear mongering politicians,

downright ignorance and a heaping fork full of
malevolence and hate, he thinks that’s not such
a bad name after all — “Hope in God, our help
and our God,” and “God, our anchor of Hope.” I

guess if it was good enough for the Psalmist
and the Hebrews and those intrepid, Dutch
immigrants, it’s good enough for him especially
in this Bleak House we call our home.

The stand-up comics up
in the Catskills kept them

rolling through the summer.
Then someone suggested

films and TV and along
came the late 50’s and 60’s

and great one-liners and
then skits and movies

that kept them rolling,
rolling long enough to

cope, for a little while,
with thoughts of the 30’s

and 40’s and the real
springtime in Germany.

The good Rev. laid it on the line
when he wrote,
“The choice is not between violence
and nonviolence but between non-
violence and nonexistence.”
Well, I guess there is
nothing about which to opine.
He said it all in one succinct line
and we are running out of time.
As the scapegoat he ran out of time,
just like the saving Scapegoat
did for all time.
But we don’t see it that way
most of the time;
scapegoats we are hell bent to find
to blame for our mimetic climb,
some kind of authentic identity to find,
which we never find
because we look for love
in all the wrong places
not knowing that
in that Scapegoat
self-sacrificial love we do find
and all hearts do bind.