The Red Wheelbarrow Poets

My Old Friend Lou

Milton Ehrlich

Every time I walk to the library
I pass my old friend’s house
who doesn’t live there,
or anywhere anymore.
The house looks the same
except for the lawn,
now emerald green,
neatly mown and trimmed,
devoid of former brown patches,
crabgrass and dandelion.
Orphaned, a deprived child,
a recycling pioneer, Lou saved
bits of string and everything
he could scrounge, shopping
at yard sales for his wardrobe,
furnishings and mounds of tools
piled topsy-turvy in his musty shop.
He had a clip on toothpaste,
insuring no paste was ever wasted.
His rusty van with over
three-hundred-thousand miles
no longer sits in the driveway.
Now a new family of kids are jumping rope,
and careening back and forth on skateboards.
I’d always stop to say hello and watch
him tinker and putter around,
tightening spokes on a Raleigh girls bike
he claimed was easier to mount since he retired.
We used to bike ten miles every other day,
20 years or more, riding round and round
a park exactly ten times measured by clothes pins
he’d shift back and forth on his handlebar.
As he aged and lost most of his friends,
he’d turn around to look, joking,
“The Grim Reaper might not be far behind.”
He insisted we bike home up the steepest hill
to insure our heart muscles would stay strong.
But days before he turned 80,
in a Cialis induced euphoria,
the Grim Reaper caught up with him.
His heart shattered like the watermelon
that fell off the rack on the back of his bike
when a bungee broke on his way home
from the market one scorching July day.

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Riding Parallel

Janet Kolstein

I’m looking out the window of a car
and imagine I’m on a horse
galloping alongside the vehicle,
and jumping over obstacles
hard by the road.

Bushes, signs, fences, billboards.

If the hurdle’s dangerously high
and threatens to clip
the horse’s limbs,
my mount sprouts wings
and becomes a Pegasus.

Now, I could add a soundtrack
to my wild, untethered side.
Let’s start with “O Fortuna”
from Carmina Burana.
I lament the wounds
that Fortune deals.

Crows in the Rain

Richard Greene

I’ve always wondered what birds do in the rain.
Surprisingly, I’ve never seen.
Today I noticed a cluster of crows
hunched stoically (I imagined)
in a tree,
a cold November downpour
running down their backs.
One was clucking faintly
as if in misery.
Now I don’t much care for crows,
but seeing them pelted with icy water
gave me a shiver of sympathy,
and I wanted them to be
somehow immune
to the wet and cold.
They must be, I thought,
or they wouldn’t be sitting in a tree.
But then where would they sit,
those shifty, thieving,
suffering fellow creatures?

Calling the Jinn

Zorida Mohammed

I hear the words “Jinn, Jinn”
as I’m falling asleep.
I sneak out of bed
and creep behind the house in the dark.

I’m struck to find my father
standing by our lime tree
so laden with limes the branches
are reaching for the ground.
His white shirt glows green in the dark,
almost the color of the Jinn’s eyes.

Our biggest and bossiest rooster
is lying dead at his feet,
next to a bottle of rum.
My father calls “Jinn, Jinn.”
He calls two or three times, and steps back
to look at the sky.

I imagine the Jinn
the shape of a big black cape,
his only discernible feature
his glowing green eyes,
swooping in any minute.

My father’s name was Alladin.
Our lamp had no magic.

The Jinn never showed.