Sleep


Sleep eludes me; hides within the discordant
caverns of my soul where only crimson
whispers live, where enigmatic metaphors
mingle with blurred visions in the dark hours
of the night… I walk on miseries of splintered
glass. A gloomy song’s musical chords crackle
like crystal leaves falling on a cobblestone path.

A night bird suddenly sings, a frog croaks
in the shadows and my waking nightmares sink
into obscurity. The soft murmurings of the night
cause my fears to fall into the moon’s luminescence
as golden angels in a melodious harmony turn
darkness into light, then into an aria of translucent
serenity overcomes my fears, and I finally sleep.


Screech Owl as first publisher of "Sleep."



The River


As I walked along the dusty path, near
the lazy flowing river, I noticed rows
of cat tail reeds fading into the vanishing
coral dusk, brown tufted messages
whispering secrets to the dark blue
stream. The holy stalks of unambiguous
character, stared at the blueness of
the sky overflowing with tenuous clouds
forcing me to remember the past.

The lazy flowing river, vanished into the
far horizon… miles, and miles of tedious
moisture curling around soft corners of
loam…leading to an obscure cacophony
of melodious ripples, and ending in a lake
 smooth as glass, where a small towheaded
boy and his father once sat in an old rowboat
fishing for an ancient trout.

Westward Quarterly as first publisher of "The River,"

Autumn Evening


In the vanishing twilight of the early fall evening, when the sky was
the color of coral fading into a dusky pinkish gray, I watched house
sparrows squabbling over remaining birdseeds. The tiny painted green
house hanging from a limb on a Birch tree outside the kitchen window
swayed in the breeze of the evening hour. A blue jay appeared and
scattered the nervous sparrows to the trees behind the house. A slight
breeze ruffled the remaining brown leaves on the trees sounding like
the crinkling of old parchment. The earth, parched from the summer sun
and the heat emerging from the scorching Indian-Summer winds, begged
for moisture. Fall arrived disguised in the form of a sweltering
summer day: Everything, except for the hot breeze, was still. The
Sparrows eventually came back and ate the remaining seeds, and I went
inside to the coolness of my house, waiting for rain.

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© Copyright, 2015, James G. Piatt.
All Rights Reserved.