September 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.

Gone

You are not in the kitchen making
scrambled eggs for our breakfast.
Or out in the patio
where small birds wait for food.
You don't burst back at dusk
rattling off the latest news.
    Yet I manage, though just barely.

But at night, I sit in a chair
trying to read a book
—and blunder—look up and find 
you are not in another chair,
not in the next room
or upstairs or anywhere
in our home's enormous silence.
    And I—can't manage,not even barely.
Originally published in Sarasvati

You Want Meaning?

The meaning of a wave's 
splurge of surf over sand
is time; of a crinkled leaf
breeze-shaken into falling
is time; of a red swarm
of ants eating a park's 
crust of bread is time;

of a man who discovers midway
through a novel he's reading
that he read it years ago
is time; of a grey-haired woman
who tries to set the table 
despite her trembling hands
is time is time is time.
©2022 Robert K. Johnson
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