Gentle Poems in a Troubled World

by David J. Rogers

 

A Writer Loves to Work:

What has night to do with sleep
When you are a writer?

 

As I Lie in Bed at Night

I lie in bed listening.
Soon the sounds
Of spoons against coffee cups
And the low drone of speech
From the kitchen cease
And my parents go to bed.
I hear the whisper of
Their slippers in the hall.

Of my family I think in my child’s
Way they are all of them–each of
Them–good people, devoid
Of malice, and I am fortunate to be
Among them.
Why have I been so favored?

“Whoever you are please treat us kindly.
Spare us please from pain or
If sparing us is not possible so apportion
Suffering so that none of us is asked to bear
More than we should be required to.”
I fall to sleep. I dream.

 

Swimming in Space

Nightly, I have been swimming in space,
The safest, serenest place,
Stroking through eternity
Gracefully, smoothly, effortlessly,
Since childhood.

Alone,
Far beneath what’s above,
High over what’s below–
Towers and cities and rivers and seas–
Gusts of silver wind I breathe.

Content, blissful,
I leave my body behind
And float as aimlessly as air
I am the air,
No destination in mind.

I am as free as I think
It is possible for me to be.
I am immortal.
I am beautiful.
I will pass this way again.

 

Butterflies, Flowers, and Lovers

Butterflies, you and I,
Fluttering over gardens–
Our little world–
From flower to flower
In search of that one who is to us,
Though perhaps to no one else,
The loveliest flower,
And when we find that lovely flower,
Then we are content forever.

 

 

 

One Dog, Two Cats, a Squirrel

My dog and cats are dead now
But the squirrel who loved them
Comes every morning to sit on the fence,
Expecting them.

 

Night to Day

The solitary moon glows,
The glittering stars glow.
The sun rises daily over city lawns–
The pallor of dawn.
So my life passes into and
Out of my thoughts.

 

Waiting For a Bus on Christmas Eve

I am ten, my little sister eight.
Excited, we are looking out
The living room window.
Slush
On the street,
Soft and hushed.

Down the street,
Before the red brick fire
House, clanking chains lashed
Around softly humming tires
Splash past.

A warm Christmas Eve,
End of day.
Grandma and Grandpa
With gifts
On their way.

Look, there they are
What do they have
In the red and yellow bags?

A doll with golden hair.
A Louisville Slugger.
Books.

 

Midwest Winters

In late October among clouds in the shapes of bells
Withered leaves spread out on dying grass
In the sorrow of fading light
Unwelcome memories fill a Midwesterner’s thoughts
With premonitions of gray, raw, implacable winter.

Too soon cruel, inevitable
North and West winter winds apply their treachery
To frigid fingers, feet, and faces.
Eyeballs freeze in their sockets.
Wailing medieval demons of winds howl
Across cities, towns, fields, silos, prairies.

Snow drifts smother every highway,
Street, river, and stream.
Everything everywhere sparkles with frost.
In a weary succession of cold monotonous days
Citizens beat a path from home to work to home,
Hungry for warmth, pleading to see any color
But the white of snow.

There is no more hateful damnable
Rapacious ferocious and treacherous
Winter than right here in the Midwest.
Where winter punishes us for adoring summer.

 

Summer Evening

After dinner when the weather was good, the fathers,
Some in gaudy suspenders, to a man seeking peace,
Left their families and went alone outside in the yard to smoke.
The glowing tips of their cigarettes or bowls of their pipes
Hovered like red ornaments suspended from invisible strings
In the darkness. The men nodded cordially to one another,
But only rarely went to their fences to speak. They stood
Stationary and solitary in the middle of the yard gazing
Up at the field of glinting stars, being reminded of
Their own inadequacy, their own insignificance,
Feeling in their souls the overwhelming rapture
And wonderment of being alive on this earth. In a little
They shredded their cigarettes or tapped out their pipes
On the soles of their shoes and watched the embers
Drift into the grass.

 

My Mother Doing the Laundry

Monarch of the
clothes pin,

servant of the
breeze;

white sheets
muttering,

white shirts
fluttering

on the
line.

Mother at her
loveliest

on the gray creaking
porch

on a sunfresh
afternoon.

 

Memories

Flickering portions of you
That accompany the people who love you,
Fastened around their heart
Forever.

 

Cool Wind

And I thought how lovely
It was to feel
Through an open window
A cool wind on a hot night
Such as this
And to see let in
Between the window shade
And the window sill
Leaves’ shadows dancing on
A midnight floor

 

Disguises

We are all so complicated and sealed up
In the disguises we wear
That we can know intimately in one lifetime
Only a person or two, and they not always,
But only in momentary bursts of understanding.
All the others we reduce to a few strokes:
That woman in the garden is lovely,
Has a lovely smile,
Owns a lovely dog.

 

The Death of a Loved One

Death leaves nothing when it departs
But still another vacancy in the heart.

 

Mushrooms White and Brown

At the base of this tree–sycamore I think–
Maple? (I don’t know) grow
Mushrooms–little umbrellas
White and brown.

 

Wind at the Beach

Suddenly a wind strikes up.
Into the air ascend three hundred white gulls.
Waves rise up from the lake,
Lunge and plunge like a field of gray-green
Wheat that then collapses on the shore,
Splaying into streams that sink into the sand
Slowly, as though unwilling to disappear.

 

 

© 2024 David J. Rogers

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