January 2025
Stephen Anderson
stephen.anderson724@gmail.com
Bio Note: My trajectory as a poet and writer has always leaned toward a global perspective, that is, one that encompasses themes and subject matter with a universal focus owing to my life history of having lived in different parts of the country as a child, as well as my Peace Corps experiences in Chile and associated travels abroad including a year of living and teaching in London.
 

Promises

Outside puffs of wind twist
and curl the blue kite, tease

its twirling ascent, its only thrust
the string-pull by the six year old girl

while her grandfather palms
it between forefinger and thumb,

patting it afloat against the resistance
of the wind, but an oncoming 

car cuts short the girl’s energized,
full-of-hope run down the street.

But there is always the chance of a replay
of that summertime duet, a ballet really

between two frolickers caught up in
their mesh of irreplaceable kinship,

in the sun, on a semi-windy day.
Originally published in On the Third Planet from the Sun: New and Selected Poems


The Then and Now of It

I went to clean my father’s tombstone the other day.
Kneeling there a meadowlark’s sounds came my way
and gave company to a gentle breeze that tousled my hair,
along with a sunlight that enlivened me there.

But my eyes teared while transfixed upon the blackened stone,
and with scrub brush and water and soap I washed it so
that its granite face sparkled aglow. 

Slowly words were uttered there, words like I miss you so,
words lost in the muted silence there on the cemetery hill,
so that a fusion did occur in the air in a slight chill.
I apologized in a prayer-like voice the sadness of my guilt,
and I made a pact, in the silence there, that true
diligence in the future I would prove.
Originally published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal


©2025 Stephen Anderson
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