1 minute read
Tom Lagasse
Climate Survival
The issue of the millennium smolders beneath the distractions of the political climate rife with corruption, and denial remains constant, a system of high pressure more constant than prayer. Needing to look away, I cast my gaze through the streaked office window.
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Finches, whose tiny bodies sway on spent mustard stalks, peck at the pods until the seeds are exposed. There is enough for now and a few spill away, like an offering to Mother Earth so she may again grant the mustard’s return. Taking flight, the finches are a blur of mustard sunshine. Will they survive the growing fire of our making?
Tom Lagasse
Sun Shower
Drinking from a glass Of ice-cold water, I Take delight in the afterNoon sun shower as It fills the bird bath drop By drop like fingers tapping Single notes on the piano; The music wakes a solitary bee From his drunken pollen Stupor in a squash blossom And sputters to find his way Back to the hive, a trail of ephemeral sweetness before being absorbed once again into the sun and soil.
Tom Lagasse
Sherman, TX 1988
Like much of my history I have forgotten his name. He arrived daily at the office around 3:45 to meet his girlfriend, a sweet middleaged woman whose name I also can’t recall, and waited in the corner of the lobby not in deference but politeness with the calm of a man accustomed to being judged.
He was old enough to be my father, uncle, or mentor. Gravity had pulled his features and laid bare a sadness his clothes could not disguise. He always wore a suit buttoned against the stifling Texas heat. Insouciantly, he examined his jacket for lint or a wayward thread His tie remained perfectly centered and pulled tight against his collar as though it might choke him.
Our conversation never moved beyond polite pleasantries like the weather or the Texas Rangers, but before all of that I asked how he made his living. He said he was an attorney in town, the first Black lawyer since the lynchings. His voice low with the resolve of a man unwilling to be defeated. A living monument to courage and the human spirit worthy of being set in bronze.
