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Saturday morning readers share:
Richard Widerkehr
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When You Ask About That Dream
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I’m lost in Yakima, but it’s more like New York.
As I trudge through abandoned buildings,
looking for my dog Zach, dead two years now,
things seem familiar, like a city
where I lost something—ashes,
a few small, cold stars. A woman I don’t know
follows me through vestibules and alcoves
whose mailboxes have been jimmied out.
We heave open a wrought-iron door.
Zach hauls himself up when he sees me,
his fur matted, his body thin.
Absently, slowly, we walk down the street
as we did when the tumor
had weakened him. I hear a thud
and turn. Near a rusty burn barrel,
Zach’s lying in a hole in the ground.
I bend to help him. Low flames
lick at his fur, flicker down his side.
I pat at beige and brown patches
almost smoldering, put my arms around him,
feeling the strength across his chest—
this fallen king, a god in disguise,
who used to lie at my door
like a sleepy lion, who butted his head
into my lap when I worked at the typewriter,
who came whenever I asked.
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❁
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Missing The Owl
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You have to come look right now,
she says. A Great Horned Owl in the spruce tree
by our red house—I scan layers and levels
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in dark branches. Nothing; then a bough
swings up, and it’s flown. At least she saw
the tufted horns, wings that open, close.
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As if some beast of mercy had offered
this late chance, I gaze at the straight, gray trunk,
dead center of the tree,
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then turn to her lilacs, humble bees—
now, the smell of rain.
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❁
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These two selections are from Missing The Owl, my fifth book, (Shanti Arts Publications). “When You Ask About That Dream” was first published in Open: A Journal of Arts & Letters, and “Missing The Owl” was taken by Main Street Rag.
– Richard
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Additional poetry by Richard Widerkehr at Verse and Image:
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