BETSEY CULLEN - POEMS

Betsey Cullen studies and teaches poetry at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Delaware. First and third prize winners at the Yorkfest Adult LiteraryCompetition in 2019, her poems have appeared in the Broadkill Review and numerous anthologies. Her collection, Our Place in Line, won Tigers’ Eye Press’ 2015 Chapbook Competition. Betsey lives in West Chester, PA. She can be reached at betseycullen@me.com. 

Henry L. Stimson*      
​at Shisendo Shrine, Kyoto

Here
under the gaze 
of 36 poets 
you must have 
removed boots
meditated 
on tatami mat
smelled 
spicy viburnum
listened 
to splash of koi.

Here 
you inhaled peace
exhaled war

Why else 
remove Kyoto
from the top hit list?

Why else 
divert the Enola Gay
and “Little Boy” 
from here
to Hiroshima?


*US Secretary for War, WW II

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The Last One
​

    Indian Hannah 
    b. 1730 - d. 1802
    Last of the Leni-Lenape in Chester County, PA
     
    
She moved like wind, rain and sun,
    
hawked brooms, baskets
found shelter at Webb’s farm

bathed papooses in the icy Brandywine 
braced young’uns for non-belonging

fended off pox among her people
dodged bullets from the Paxon Boys.

In Chester County’s Poor House,
she breathed her last.

Scant honor being last. Last frontier.
Last gasp. Last judgment. 

Last a sting. 

Still we honor her.
Boulders, brass plaques 

mark birthplace, cabin, gravesite.
Down Indian Hannah Road

find her eagle feather 
etched in granite.

We’re the ones
who butchered the bird. 





At the German Cemetery
    in La Cambe, Normandy

​

              …see but our hands      
             and the bleeding business      
             they have done…       
               Julius Caesar

My father limps through the arch,
his knuckles white on cane, 

shoulders slumped, as if burdened 
by the death of 22,000 souls.

Clusters of five crosses
mark a multitude of graves

strewn like stepping stones
over close-cropped grass. Lava-black, 

the crosses seem like hands of cards, 
each one a bloodied flush of honor. 

My father hid the hand 

that polished Gott Mit Uns on belt buckle, 
lurched at rifle recoil, shooed flies off flesh.

In the grip of brothers scored in stone, 
he mutters Too much.

Even so, I cannot take his hand. 


​

​Tom

You gaze from formal portrait –
trim beard, dark turtleneck, 
tight jeans, black skull cap – a spirit

fine schools couldn’t suppress,
a sales guy with vagabond soul.
You earned twenty million,

stashed the stock, paid off wife 
and five children (shackles of youth),
bunked drunk in a ’65 Mustang.

At home with hobos, you rode the rails 
from Fargo to Seattle, as much a relic
as the steam locomotive.

After reentering polite society
you still railed against modernity, 
wrote block-print letters 

peppered with interjections,
words like values and tradition
underlined in red ink, twice.

Now you lean on a boxcar door 
nailed open with a railroad spike –
a rover, outward bound.


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