Category Andrew Hidas Poems

                     “MOMMY!”

               By Andrew Hidas

The tiniest shortfall of a tiny hand,
merrily reaching for safety poolside—
and missing.

Fateful collision of lip and cement,
the gash gushing precious blood
staining red the waterwings designed
to forestall catastrophe.

Flurry of activity, lifeguards rushing,
the ice they bring serving as balm
for body and soul, halfway to the ER
his babble already resuming the
incessant joyful grrrrr of
trucks and dinosaurs.

Five hours later, exhausted and
asleep on his mother’s chest,
darkness abiding, the team finally assembles,
doctor, nurses, interns, respiratory therapist,
eight persons forming a semi-circle
of solemn duty.

The shake and tug to coax him awake,
grasped by multiple hands descending,
his sudden panic beyond all soothing,
needle in the right leg, needle in the left,
“MOMMY!” comes the deep desperate
wail to she who is dear...

  VLADIMIR PUTIN INVADES MY DREAMS

                                        By Andrew Hidas

Fresh off the shingles vaccine,
arm sore, body leaden,
spirit damp and porous,
Vladimir Putin invades my dreams
through a long night I long to repel.

I want him out! gone! no more of
those lizard eyes and pursed lips
bearing down on my weakened
defenses, looking to run
roughshod over all I hold dear.

Groaning to a barely wakened state,
I lapse again, the nightmare resuming,
the assault relentless, Putin throwing
all he owns (and he owns everything)
into a fire of his own making
as lives all around us burn.

Names cross my consciousness
like some Ticker of Times Square,
Navalny…Yashin…Kara-Murza,
dissidents facing the unspeakable
of poisonings and prison,
their courage inconceivable
under Putin’s soulless gaze.

Dawn looms and the thrashings of night
only intensify, pleas from the gloaming
to find ...

WATCHING MY GRANDDAUGHTER’S GYMNASTICS CLASS
                     WHILE CONGRESS DEBATES AR-15s

                                   By Andrew Hidas

Everything to live for,
the everything
stretched out
before them,
gamboling like lambs
let loose
to bound
and bound
in the
tall grasses of spring.

Parents on their phones
up above, a half-eye at
most diverted from Facebook,

the glowing faces
of their daughters
lost in the jumble of
limbs below.

“He shot my friend that was next to me and I thought
he was going to come back to the room, so I grabbed
the blood and put it all over me.”

That was Miah the other day,
testifying to a House committee
on the trickery she used to save
her life, though what nightmares still
await that life we can only, grimly,
imagine.

“Sweet Miah,” Uvalde’s only pediatrician
called her, trailing off at the same hearing
after describing the scene at ...

    THEY’RE PLANTING TULIPS IN KHARKIV

           By Andrew Hidas

The news tells us of mass
tulip plantings in Kharkiv,
just one more Ukrainian city
bringing new definition
to the word “beleaguered”
in this long spring of horrors.

I picture those tulips tightly clutched
in fists, shaken and ascending to
the heavens as an ultimate “Fuck you!”
to the bomb-droppers and missile senders
who become blinded by the color explosion
of tulip petals hurled aloft in anger, defiance
and hope—blessed, dubious, inexplicable hope.

In our front garden the other day,
the world’s most purposeful sparrow
hops across the gravel, sweeping
up dead leaves in her beak till they
obscure her entire head, a holy payload
destined to welcome life in a nearby tree.

I marvel at her madness of intention,
the sacred instinct for survival and comfort
guiding her every move like no missile
guidance system ever afforded ...

               RESURRECTION FOR NON-CHRISTIANS

                                  By Andrew Hidas

Stay with me now, you non-Christians (of which I am one).
The hard believers will insist there’s nothing for you here,
Irredeemable heathens that you persist in Being.
But believe not, I say, in those believers, their binaries
Blinding them to nuance, context, symbol, the
Dusky liminal depths of myth more real than reality.

Resurrection is yours, too, for the taking.

You need not wear a cross on your chest,
Nor hang on one for the many sins you
Share in common with your brothers and sisters,
Perfection being the chimera that the
Christ himself was said to dispel.

Sinning is yours, too, for the committing.

You need only behold the tulips of spring,
The spring in your own step as day beckons
Or night falls with the slow revelation of stars.

Death and rebirth suffuse our lives, all life it...