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DAVE BACHMANN - POEMS

12/29/2020

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Picture
Dave is a retired special education teacher of 40 years who taught English and creative writing in Arizona to youth with emotional disabilities and those on the autism spectrum.  He now lives and writes children’s stories, grown-up stories and poetry in California with his wife, Jay, a retired Kindergarten teacher along with their 13-year-old Lab, Scout (of To Kill a Mockingbird fame).

​Maybe

​Maybe you didn’t hear the words to the Pledge of Allegiance
you recited every day in elementary school.
You know, the part about ‘with liberty and justice for all.’
And maybe you didn’t hear the words to the Star-Spangled Banner
you sang before every football, basketball and baseball game.
The part about the flag waving
‘O’er the land of the free and home of the brave.’
Maybe you didn’t hear your American History teacher
when he discussed that part of the Declaration of Independence
that says ‘all men are created equal.’
And maybe you didn’t hear the words to the oath of office you took,
the part about ‘never employing unnecessary force or violence.’
Maybe you just didn’t hear all those things.
Which may explain why you didn’t hear
the handcuffed black man you had face down on the pavement
with your knee on his neck, when he cried out
“I can’t breathe.”
 

​Strawberry

​She pries open the plastic container
extracts one strawberry
examining it like a jeweler
looking for flaws in a diamond.
Perhaps she’ll make her famous
avocado strawberry caprese salad
or maybe her ever-popular
strawberry brushetta grilled cheese.
She does not see the woman
swathed in bandanas, scarves and long sleeves
pushing the one wheeled cart between the rows
bent over at 90 degrees for ten hours
who placed each strawberry
into the clamshell container,
the container she now holds in her hand.
Maybe a nice mango-strawberry smoothie with lime zest.
 

​Peach Flower

​It’s the flower he remembers.
The Viet Cong, the vermin, the pigs
had been driven out.
And now he sat in a foxhole,
one of their foxholes,
cradling the delicate peach flower left behind.
One of their peach flowers.
Hoa dao.
Forty-nine years later
he sits in a tent under the freeway.
Cars speed by, glaring at the vermin, the pigs.
It’s the flower he remembers.
It was red.
 
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