New Poems • Spring 2026
/Hi All,
Happy Spring. Excited to share a few new poems. You can read them below.
Sending care,
Judy
Politic
Stick to the facts.
Don’t fret about the righteous,
Their sanctimony, their bullying.
Pledge faith to sea,
Its great depths,
Its blueness, honest as the sky’s;
Out West: there are Indians
In India: there are Indians;
Accept this total misapplication.
You must make peace with the clock, the calendar.
Allow what an hour consists of,
A day, a week, a month;
You have wondered exactly why
You are here.
Recognize what is absolute.
A time of warmth will follow a chill.
A tree is a tree.
Not a brook, not a bale, not a boy:
A tree is what you must climb so
As not to be vanquished
Then eaten
By what is called wild.
Mary Lou, Last Summer
heat rules burns everything
green curls to rust
sun presses down
a simpering smile-button
the dejected landscape
consorts with her bitterness
at night Banjo Ted
a little wine soiled linens
hours pass somehow until
the heavy breath he exhales
raises sweetish bile
chokes her throat
midnight desperation she says no
runs he tries but does not catch her
hammering away on the club’s
the gym’s the ship’s every locked door
the song he writes Last Summer
weaves the story his way
heroism his twangy
theme a simple three chord strum
New Pittsburgh Airport Hosts a Chabad Wedding
I spent most of today, March 18, struggling to remember the name for the clinging cloth hat women sometimes wear and I wore because I feared being bareheaded
at the Orthodox Jewish wedding of the Rabbi’s daughter at the new Pittsburgh Airport.
It was a lot, that event: spectacular: an outdoor canopy (chuppah) shaking in the high winds, a bride and groom who may or may have not met before,
squeezed together with every relative possible under that chuppah, planes taking off above when the snow-whipping winds died down. I could barely see any of this as there were at least five hundred people there, most of them in front of me. But such joy! Such cheer! The repetition of ancient tradition! The world beginning again! An unlikely but wonderful story to tell the grandchildren someday!
And now, twenty-two hours later it came to me: I wore a turban.