July 2022
Robert K. Johnson
choirofday@cs.com
Bio Note: My poems are spins on our everyday world, which has always gripped me much more than science-fiction worlds. A now retired English Professor, I taught for many years at Suffolk University in Boston. I also for several years was Poetry Editor for IBBETSON STREET magazine. I have had several collections of poems published.

Two Weeks

before my mother died:
her head propped up by a pillow
in the hospital bed, she stops
pretending to pay attention
to the food I offer her
and, staring nowhere, says,
“I guess I...acted badly
in our house on Union Place.”

Instantly I'm living in 
the tangle of those ten years.
I hear again—morning
after wretched morning—my mother 
shout words as hot as slaps
at my dad until he flees
to work, and I to school.
                 What can I say?

“Well...it's all forgotten now.”

On the First Day

When I reach the goodbye door
that, now, will keep her locked 
in the dementia ward,

Pat, my sixty-years wife,
already settling in,
suddenly starts to sing, 

“It's only me from over the sea,
Said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.”

—A song I never heard
her sing before,
never knew she knew.

And though it's not possible,
I'm even more heartsick.
©2022 Robert K. Johnson
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