basilverse

  Some Old Poems, by Robert Basil Briggs Room Reading Stanford University Spring 1984 Hi there, everybody. This August I was sitting outside the Student Union reading To the Lighthouse . It was a spacey day, and out of the store comes this little kid with a woman I presumed to be his Mom. The woman had three chocolate bars, and she gave the child one half of one. The Union bees were waiting for him to open it. They had already crawled into my coke can, too intent on sucking sugar up to sting me when I waved at them.  The woman gives the child her chocolate bar and she walks away, and I might have seen her start eating,  but reading all day made me too tired to turn my neck, so I just heard her unwrapping. Then the child said the first two lines of my poem.  I was blown away by the beauty of his words and how they represented in haiku implicitness  the perfect tasty union  of mother and child. Then the child said the third line of my poem and that changed everything. Because the words t