Darling
We were driving somewhere,
anywhere—
I in my nineties,
Lucia in her
eighties—
Two widows in the back,
When I said,
We
turn right at the next corner, Darling.
He
said "darling," said the first widow;
Yes,
he said "darling," said the second.
Restoration Poem
Charles the Second, aggrieved
monarch—
His father decapitated,
He is a wandering beggar in those
years of exile,
Waiting for his triumphal return—
He shakes his head and answers
"Nay"
To the Commons in their pursuit of
vengeance.
A strange man, a merry man:
Women flowed in and out of his bed
Like water in a sluice.
When one of them exclaimed
"Your majesty! What an honor!
What good luck!"
Quoth the king, as he thrust
deeply,
"Can the chatter, call me
Chuck."
Paul Grayson served as a weather observer in World War II
in the U.S. Air Force for four years, including two years in mainland Alaska
and the Aleutian Islands. He has a B.S.
in botany and an M.S. and Ph.D. in agricultural economics. Prior to retirement, he worked as a
statistician and economist for the Census Bureau, Social Security
Administration, and the IRS. His poems
have appeared in Mercury, Comment,
Phoenix, Quirks, and the Statistical
Reporter. He has published research
papers in the Journal of Farm Economics,
Statistics of Income Bulletin, and elsewhere. He has been a featured reader of his poetry
on satellite radio and at Mariposa, the Kensington Library, and other D.C. venues. Paul recently celebrated his 95th birthday.
