March 2024
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.

Still Dreaming

I wake from an old-age nap,
see the dusk's gold sunlight
lengthen a floor lamp's shadow
across the living room rug,

and want—more than anything else—
to walk from the park after playing
all day with my grade-school friends
and reach my home's front stoop

where my father, still in work clothes,
stands waiting to say, “Well, hello”
and my mother is busy bringing
a warm meal to the dinner table.

In My Ninetieth Year
	for Lynn Fontanne

How lucky that I feel kin
to the actress dressing for
her play's last performance
who tells her costume assistant
that—at last—she's figured out

the right gesture for a moment 
in the third act's major scene,
and when the assistant sighs,
“How sad it's too late now,”
she replies, “There's still tonight!”
Originally published in Poetry Porch
 
©2024 Robert K. Johnson
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