Two Poems by Charlie Becker

After Rilke

My own life timid

standing high and growing,

my own quiet and breathless

the song of summer birds

in tune with church carillons,

round and solid

everyday stronger

like the oldest redwoods

at the height of June,

my own,

opening its eyes

smiling from the corneas,

sure of itself

and what it has become,

the next moment

being a star

holding onto sunlight

jumped from silver to setting

and used for a galaxy

that has never been so visible.         

When We Sleep

Winter nights

I lie

in bed 

and wait

for rain,

something I seem

to want

more and more,

its quiet empathy

different

from frivolous snow

or a perfect cloudless sky

more internal

less transient

all-knowing,

and I listen

for the space

between drops

so in the morning

there might be

song sparrows.

Charlie Becker is a retired speech and language specialist who continues to bring poetry to under-served high school students in Los Angeles through the Living Writers Series. Charlie uses poems from his book, Friends My Poems Gave Me, published by World Stage press in 2016, to inform and sensitize his students to issues confronting marginalized LGBT-Q seniors and disabled seniors, as well. Charlie has been part of a writing group, which meets on the University of Southern California Campus, called the Community Literature Initiative (CLI), for the past six years. Some of his poems have been published in Rush Magazine (Mount St. Mary’s University Press, 2018), Passager Books Poetry Contest (Honorable Mention, 2018), Extreme: An Anthology for Social and Environmental Justice (2018), and The Dandelion Review (2019). 

Charlie lives in West Hollywood, California.