DAVE BALDWIN - POEMS

Dave Baldwin recently retired from the Walt Disney Company (Disney Technology) in Seattle after a 40-year career as a technical writer and editor. Dave lives in Lake Stevens, WA. 

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​Now That I Am Dead
 
On reading “Evening Land” by Pär Lagerkvist
 

​As I stooped through the low portal of death,
I saw my human fate
Emptied out into the lethe.
 
Life’s luggage of love and hate
Was left behind the wall;
The gardener burned my once-essential freight.
 
I asked myself if this was all.
Intelligent souls clicked like dolphins in the wind
On either side of the wall,
 
Discerning everything.  My mind
Came clean; discernment whirled ahead
As soon as I was schooled by the garrulous wind.
 
Now that I am dead,
I know that God did not create the soul;
The soul created God instead.
 
Now that I am dead, I know the soul
Imagined heaven straddling earth
Where God was hired to rule
 
Irascible man and iterative death/rebirth.
I dreamed of an infinite life,
A dream encoded before my birth,
 
Because one life was not enough.
I know that paradise was once inside my head,
Now that I am dead.
 

 

Change
 
For a Memorial Service
​

​The sacred sea defines
Our summed collective soul.
 
Our infinite designs
Are in the sea’s control.
 
We scarcely understand
Our fundamental start.
 
We cannot comprehend
The sum of every part.
 
As the aeons come and go,
Its silent flow and blend
Is all we ever know;
But now we feel the wind.
 
A molecule of water
That skims the sacred sea
And breathes corporeal air
Resembles you and me.
 
As soon as we are tossed
Above the nurturing foam,
This flesh, from found to lost,
Obscures our natural home
In such a pleasing way
We lose the cosmic sweep
Of comely, sunborne spray
Rounded by the deep.
 

Celebrating Peace

​

​1.
 
Today we gather in this faraway space
To celebrate what never took place.
 
Under this cloudless sky
The Unknown Soldier did not die.
 
No one was wounded on this spot.
Nary a soldier fired a shot.
 
No soldier sang a battle hymn
Or killed or died or lost a limb.
 
On this our distant grassy field,
No corpse was lifted onto a shield.
 
The world at war is far away;
Let peace begin with us today.
 
2.
 
Fog is rising from the thawing ground.
Birds are soaring without a sound.
 
Cedars shimmer in the morning breeze.
Snowy mountains back the trees.
 
For a world at war, where do we start?
Peace begins in the human heart.
 
By changing hearts one by one,
Changed hearts lower the gun.
 
Today we promise to work for peace,
Changing hearts in the name of peace.
 
The world at war is far away;
Let peace begin with us today.