Strong Roots

By Tamara Beck

Vegetables with strong roots are my
Favorites. Tubers and groundlings, that
Burrow in the earth
Emerging sweetly and firmly
Ugly ducklings that become
An epicurean delight.

The here and now

By Tamara Beck

Believe in life

Not life hereafter

Live now not in a
Kingdom of the dead
Imagined by mystics of a church

Your life's rewards are here

Take them now

And her story is your story

Sometimes you meet someone

And her story is your story

It is an unusual and eerie moment

Are you the doppelganger or is she?

by Tamara Beck

A Wounded Flower

A wounded flower, a tulip , a rich pink color

Lying at my feet, plucked untimely

Not in tribute, vandalized really,

Fallen flat on its face

It’s deep thick petals beginning to curl,

To lose their sinuous luster

Plucked in anger or indifference, laid out

To display its withering splendor

Beauty besmirched by idle careless hands,

I step around it but soon it will be trampled into

Meaningless obscurity

(c) Tamara Beck

A vacation in paradise

The day is slow and leisurely

Like an island holiday, a vacation in paradise.

By Tamara Beck

Suddenly it grinds to an end,

Over just as you are enjoying your latte,

Your umbrella drink, one cold dark beer.

The day ends in a brilliant sunset,

Clouds high overhead burst as quickly as they appear,

Out of nowhere, leaving puddles like

Lakes in the damp chilled ground

Sparkling pools for you to navigate around

Under a fool moon.

A day in the [ball] park

I am celebrating the grace of baseball

My t-shirt is a paean to the beauty of the sport.

Its tempo sometimes as smooth as a curveball sent right over the plate,

Sometimes slowed by pitches holding back the speed at first

Staccato, then the sharp slide, the run to home

The drum beat crack of a bat and the deep arc of a ball over the wall

The chorus of fans adding their sighs and applause

Everything in the warm clear sun of the ballpark moving slowly

Inevitably to the final out or the triumphant thud of another winning homerun

(c) Tamara Beck 2000

A Cautionary Tale

Here’s an interesting cautionary tale for you. It’s a story about how a well-developed ancient culture once blew itself up. Once there was great global civilization. It had developed over many millions of years and reached a pinnacle of technological intelligence. The hominid animals who had achieved so much may have had their beginnings in ancient swamps as one celled beings.

Their history was 4 million years old, living in forests and savannahs as hunters and gathers, these people had developed into a very advanced civilization indeed. These beings learned to walk on two legs, developed physical and mental prowess. Many of them counted their years on earth from the death of a man they saw as a great prophet and perhaps even the son of God. So it was in their 21st century that this highly evolved group of beings that populated the entire planet on which it lived began plotting its own demise.

It developed annoying technologies that made communication but that also isolated one being from the other. You understand that most of these beings crowded into relatively small land masses so they lived in close proximity to each other.

They developed many advances which made it easier to get from one part of their globe to another faster. Many of their advances caused damage to the air they breathed. These were beings who depended on air for breath, for life, for their existence. They also needed water to survive and much of their advances seriously polluted their water supplies. But none of these idiotic choices and errors in judgment were fatal to the beings or event or their food supplies. They caused damage but there was still much hope for this world.

In the early 21st century this civilization, having “conquered” space earlier in the 20th century, decided to use this “last frontier” (as they called “space”) one more time.

By conquering space, the beings on this planet meant they had sent rocket ships to explore nearby planets and stars. They had even landed some sort of exploratory vehicle on a hostile planet in their own orbit. They called space “the last frontier” because exploration and adventure were part of their culture.

In the early 21st century, they decided that it would be wise to launch destructive weapons into space, into this “last frontier.” They made this decision despite the fact that many of their technologies were often flawed. They knew this about their technologies. They had seen them go awry often. Their vehicles overturned on occasion, their computing machines jammed and were attached by destructive nihilists they referred to as “hackers.”

They experienced all these technological glitches in the course of their everyday lives. Even some of their weapons of war were known to fail, or misfire or be misdirected.

Despite all of this, they decided to go ahead with a plan to put weapons of war into space, into the “last frontier.” They felt this was a way to protect themselves from other beings that peopled their planet.

So they shot weapons up into space hoping that nothing would go wrong.

By Tamara Beck