Like
Memories In Mid-Air
by
Frederick Michaels
We
have grown to be so old
(right
before our very eyes),
yet,
despite the years compiled,
not
emerged as very wise.
We
let time just melt away,
pass
right by without disguise.
In
a steady drip of hours,
years
have dematerialized.
We’re
like footprints we impress
into
freshly fallen snow,
leading
backward through our past
There’s
no better place to go.
What
we are, or might become,
none
can tell and none can know,
as
our tracks begin to vanish,
oft
times fast, sometimes slow.
And
the snowflakes fall like memories in mid air,
concealing
lives which were not really there.
You
Give Them A Cookie ...
by
Frederick Michaels
Deer
crowd into my doorway,
peering
right into my kitchen
like
a posed Norman Rockwell,
but
with a plaintive, hungry gaze.
A
doe and three curious fawns,
in
great Halloween costumes.
Kids
have a dumbfounded look
as
mom ventures inward alone.
I
imagine a proper British accent.
It
just seems so very appropriate.
“Might
I trouble you for snacks?
The
family and I are famished!”
The
siren call of baking cookies
has
summoned their arrival,
overcome
their survival instincts
and
fear of a fur-less, upright man.
Woodland
visitors are infrequent,
so
I’m grateful for the intrusion.
A
plate wafting scents of vanilla
tempts
the fawns to join mother.
Baked
offerings fully consumed,
all
but the mother scamper out
like
children do at a recess bell,
anxious
to be first for hopscotch.
The
doe strides towards the door,
parading
head high, then stops,
sighs
“next time, tea please” and
exits
proudly, like a grande dame.
Frederick
Michaels
writes in retirement from his home in Indianapolis. His poetry has
appeared in Flying Island, So It Goes Literary Journal, The Boston
Poetry Journal, Branches magazine, The Australian Times and Lone
Stars magazine, among others. A number of his poems appear in the
Reckless
Writing 2012
and
2013 anthologies (Chatter House Press, Indianapolis), Naturally
Yours
(Stacy Savage and Kathy Chaffin Gerstorff, printed in Charleston,
S.C., 2013), Words
and Other Wild Things
(Brick Street Poetry, Zionsville, Ind., 2016), and Paw
Prints in Verse
(Stacy Savage, printed in Lexington, Ky., 2017). His first collection
of poems, Potholes
In The Universe,
was published in 2016 by Chatter House Press, Indianapolis. An
engineer by training, Michaels has always been pulled to the side of
the arts by his love of language. He would say that the words are
always there, they just need to be put in the proper order.