Mailing out the Compass - The Buddha at LeRoy's Flower Shop - Poem: Saying Goodbye to the Buddha

Shipping facility of The Compass. Mailed out a big batch at the Hatboro post office. They are incredibly expensive to mail. They are stapled magazines.

No wonder, I said to Jim, so many magazines go out of business.

I tried to get a cheaper price.... educational material.... mail out a slower way.

Nope.

Afterward I paid a visit to LeRoy's Florist Shop. LeRoy and his wife Ruth were behind the counter.

The shop sells lovely lovely items.

My friend Martha would LOVE these delicate items... look at the tiny coffee or tea server straight ahead.

Thother day I ordered flowers over the phone with LeRoy's son, Bob. My friend Yin Liu loved them! Her late husband would frequently send her flowers.

Her poem about her late husband, who died last summer, appears in this issue of The Compass.

Look at the lovely Buddha residing at LeRoy's. But not for much longer.

He orig bought her - I think of her as female - for the famous Philadelphia Flower Show. She had been living outdoors and was covered with moss!

When he brought her indoors, the moss melted and fell off. 

To get in the mood to write the poem, I selected a certain CD in my collection

Steely Dan. And played the song Bodhisattva.

Here's the poem, which was a pleasure to write.


BUDDHA GOODBYE

Wooden cross above the sharecropper's mattress

Qur'an with sensual Arabic script he looks at
during his years of imprisonment at Graterford

Torah, covered in blue velvet, at Beth Sholom
paraded down the aisle on
Shabbat eve, we reach out and kiss it
with our fingers

Long-eared Buddha, there for the looking
inside LeRoy's Flower Shop, once part of
an exhibit at the Flower Show

Now she's too old. And like a
slave, she's been sold at the auction
block.

Sold! For six hundred. I will say
my goodbyes until she vanishes
for good.

She knows me. She believes in me.
She washes my heart clean.
She says, Child I will give you
peace and creativity. Believe.
Believe in yourself and then
there is nothing on earth
you cannot do.