100 Short Poems
Abandoned farm
The weathered barn sags inward.
The farmhouse windows are broken and the door ajar.
Scattered among the untended fruit trees dying from blight
The emptied boxes of grayed and fallen beehives with no trace
Of the busy bees that once fanned the air around them.
Aberdeen, Maryland
Grayish winter clouds move in a silent train above
the apartments, homes, businesses, streets and lanes
of this self-anointed "America's City." Keeping count,
a large hard-to-miss sign opposite the library entrance
displays the YTD numbers of drug overdoses and deaths.
Winter full moon
In a cloudless dawn sky
low and seemingly close
large and shining brightly
settling a calming influence
on a solitary, unquiet mind.
African Drought
Seen from high above,
their heads turned inward
and rear hooves splayed out,
a small circle of dead giraffes
atop the baked rust-colored earth.
Harbingers
My window panes rattle. Outside
the clouds are speeding elsewhere quickly.
Bare tree branches wave as if crazed.
Brown leaves scud along the ground.
From the west, a cold front is pushing in.
Athens, Greece
On a rooftop terrace in the predawn dark,
after collecting together some things to eat,
I sit facing a rocky outcrop across some rooftops
its top bathed in spotlights that warm an iconic ancient
weathered building aglow above the waking city.