I turned Eighty-Five
On the morning
of a Royal Wedding
All the pagentry and song
Auspiciously including
My Birthday with a TV invitation
With such historical moment
That I know
This Birthday bonds with history
The protocol of Royal Ritual
Makes turning Eighty-Five
a mirror image
of an almost
Fantasy surprise
Ted Goodell
May 2018
How fierce we’ve become
Since the first spear was flung
A kingdom of caves
Rising into cities of steel
The eternal struggle
To fashion living and thinking
With the intricacy of speech
A burning image
Becomes a sparkling wonder
A centering of spectral force
Silently stirring and searching
Finding the arch of energy
Rising like a song
Above the hungering
Journey of being human.
Ted Goodell
March 28, 2018
Dogs and cats
are the subjects
of many poems
And so are trees and flowers and flames
And children leaping puddles in the rain
But dogs and cats
preserve the safety of their secrets to the end
Leaving poetry to know
They harbor ways unknown
yet deeper than the song
of any poem
Ted Goodell
March 2018
The testicles hang side by side,
Swaying twins, silent tumbling
Mates in celestial song
They navigate in stormless
Circles, shy orbiting seeds.
Partisans, side by side
They swirl and pivot,
Smooth and elliptical they roll,
They circle in dark
Orbital space
Sprouting a million stars,
Devoted swimmers
In a sea no swooping
Sounds disturbs.
Ted Goodell
1978
Is It Saturday or Sunday 