Category: Philosophy

When I consider how my life’s misspent,
My spare time wasted, doesn’t it seem strange
The thing that I most bitterly resent
Is waiting for the traffic lights to change!

by Ray Romine Saturday, September 17, 1949

Past definite discouragements,
Thwarted here and baffled there–
Over ridicule and the rubble of poverty,
Still he scrambled.
To have given up
Would have been much easier,
But he couldn’t do that.
He used to say
If you kept butting your head
Against a wall,
Sooner or later
Something would give.
I don’t like to think about his being locked
In that kind of institution.
Still, he was right.

But I can’t help wondering:
If his head had held out
Maybe just a little longer
Would folk today be calling him
A Big Success
Instead of Just Obstinate?

by Ray Romine Thursday, July 5, 1945

She tapped at the raw edge of Greatness;
She paused where the tides ebb and flow;
She touched where Intelligence founders,
In the bone-weary Portals of Know.
She sold humankind down the river;
She told friends and kin where to go
For one little pot-bellied puppet,
For one tiny section of dough.

But the puppet is shrunken in stature,
A fate it has shared with the dough;
And her world, returning from Glamor,
Is an error-strewn mockery show.
In a garden full warty and weary,
She planted the seed sure to grow–
And now that the Bitter has flowered,
Regret is a hard-to-kill foe…

by Ray Romine Tuesday, September 23, 1952

Some days are full of happiness,
While other days are bleak;
Some hours are worth the candle;
Some aren’t, so to speak.

Some minutes give us pleasure,
Some pain us in the necks;
But seconds are the final straws
That make us total wrecks.

For man, these days of living fast,
Of taxing cell and brain,
Was not, when seconds change his life,
Built to stand the strain.

So I’ll watch seconds swapping ends
As long as I can stand it,
Nor curse my gods nor swear at fate–
For it was man who planned it.

by Ray Romine Thursday, January 4, 1951

Faith is his who plants a seed.
He could reap corn–or nought–or weed;
But he who moves with faith unfurled
May see his seed reshape a world.

by Ray Romine Monday, July 7, 1947

You’re sitting at night on a vine-covered terrace
With a very nice portion of unmarried heiress
And the nerve to be bored, but the other eleven
Out of a dozen would think they’re in Heaven.

You ‘re fishing up north where the pines tower taller,
Throwing back eighteen-inchers and anything smaller,
And you wish you were home, while some hard-work evaders
Would lease their eye teeth just to be in your waders.

So, dear public, we differ, and what pleases one
Ia hardly the other guy’s notion of fun.
And I worry, for Heaven holds what for a guy
Who can’t twang a harp and who won’t learn to fly??

by Ray Romine Friday, July 21, 1950

Once “That Younger Generation”,
Grandpa’s now esteemed and sage.
It’s a backward situation:
Rotten youth to ripe old age!

by Ray Romine Sunday, October 22, 1950

He’d always wanted Just to try
His hand at flying, but the sky
Seemed far removed, until one day
A flyer, in a casual way,
Dropped in to use the phone. “Forced down
In your far pasture–toward the town,”
The pilot grinned a tight-lipped smile,
Went on, “I swore, out there, while
Coming in, to thank the man
Who figured out that pasture’s plan.
Yourself? Then I’m your staunch supporter-
Thank God you weren’t ten feet shorter!”

The farmer, from his tractor seat,
Eyes the flyer’s take-off feat;
And on to work, content thereby
To help another climb the sky.

by Ray Romine Sunday, April 30, 1950

I ponder on the hopelessness
Of all society,
Perhaps because the specimen
That I know best is me.

by Ray Romine Thursday, July 6, 1950

A lark, upwinging, sings “Come here.
“Come, man, with me into the sky.”
But all the years have maae it clear:
Who rules shall plod–and cannot fly.

by Ray Romine Tuesday, July 17, 1945