Before Kennedy (by Mitch Sisskind)

Each Saturday Lou's four hour pinochle
Game now in its thirtieth-first year,
Pinochle again on Monday nights
And on Fridays the family card games,
Men and women at separate tables.

To the downtown public library
I bore my briefcase after school
In Eisenhower’s last years to read
Old newspapers: WAR the full page
Headline of 1917 and again in 1941.

Here and there bent over tables
In the gloomy main reading room
Men wiping their eyes, coughing,
Blowing their noses until limping
Urgently to the awful bathroom.

These men, were they younger
Than Lou I found myself asking.
I saw his steps shortening until
He died like the silver dot on the
Turned-off television screen.