March 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.

A One Day Holiday

The holiday frees the youngest kids
to play board games or watch tv;
frees teenagers to play basketball
or soccer or mob a shopping mall,
frees adults to do a household chore
they've long postponed or do something
that evades their doing a household chore.

But there are no holidays for the old.
They're never free from swallowing
a row of pills or trying to button 
a shirt or searching for something misplaced
or deciding to get up from a chair
or stay still and take another nap,
before they sleep free of all days.

Last Night
(October 18, 2001)

I saw a movie made
three or four years ago
that deftly used two hours

for a story that portrayed
life in a city school,
but a story pale in its powers

compared to the truth conveyed
in the film's split-second view
of what was once the Twin Towers.
Originally published in From Mist To Shadow
©2022 Robert K. Johnson
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