Three Poems by Herb Kitson

 

For Kathy, whose favorite season was winter (1949-2021)

Snow sifts through pines,

Whispers of another time 

There’s no turning back.

Your night sounds

The joy you rose with in the morning.

The laughter of your robust afternoons.

Gone.

Light leaves us early in December.

Memory is a chilly mountain that we climb

Under the first wishful stars of evening,

Somewhere between home and forever.

                                                 

Trying To Wake Up (On a Rainy Evening)

It’s like kneading dough for cookies, muffins,

digging into a mound of pasta, chewing rubbery seafood, trudging 

through deep mud.  One eye tried to open, 

to tell me  it was dark, that I’d been sleeping

since noon. 

There were noises in the air, balloons. 

I was being dragged down the road

behind a pick-up truck.  There was dust,

men laughing, airplanes taking off.

Angels were everywhere, old lovers

sliding with me down a dune of sugar.

After someone gifted me a type of currency,

I began spinning on a wheel of numbers, days, years.

I heard the rain whispering not to wake me up 

to what isn't.    

                                                   

First Whipping

Secret thunder.

Reason inimical

 to memory.

You can't suck

honey from a rock.

Honor cannot erase

the onslaught

of tainted dream, 

scars  

on the soul,

 sharp 

as gray sky in winter.

Infirmity shouts 

at the drenching rain

to stop.  

A bitterness

that will never go away.

___

Dr. Herb Kitson is a professor emeritus in English at the University of Pittsburgh-Titusville.

Herb and a friend live in western Pennsylvania. Publication credits include two book, two

chapbooks and 200+ poems in various magazines.