20190621.0430

This webspace has seen five previous posts on 21 June, in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Several of the posts are poems, whether free verse (as in 2014 and 2016), a sonnet (2017), or a limerick in a chain of them (2018). The 2015 prose piece mused in part on Father's Day--and it is odd to me that, even days after marking the holiday this year, I am reminded of it by past years. Calendars are funny things, it seems.
As I look on the poems not in sequence, it seems to me that two of them work together: the 2016 and 2017 pieces. I present them again below to ease reading. First, the free verse:

A popular game
Among my people
Could be called
Spot the Problems
Because what we invest in
Is used
And misused
And the misuses attract attention

Some folks' investments
Are not misused
People get the details right
But they do not care
So much
About mine

If we want the real
If we want the authentic
Why do we not attend more to
Small things
From which the bigger things emerge?

And the sonnet:

I sometimes err, of course, as do we all,
Thinking that events are sure to fall
A certain way, but I do well recall
That they unfold full oft to my despite,
And come about in ways I think not right,
While others take in them no small delight.
Why it is so is all unclear to me,
And I question why I seem to be
Always on the losing side, to see
What I think is wrong often to rise.
I wonder why it me will still surprise.
The scene is often placed before my eyes.
I guess I am all unable to learn
That way in which the world is sure to turn.

The free verse reads as a complaint, the sonnet as an acknowledgement that the complaint comes from one not free of the kinds of faults on which the first focuses. The sonnet does turn to self-pity, as I have noticed a fair number of my poems do, and I am not happy about the implications my writing has for me, but it does at least demonstrate that I apply to myself the same scan for failure that the free verse describes.
Honestly, I had thought I might have had more to say. It seems, though, that there's not as much as I might like. I don't know that I'm happy about those implications, either.