Daniel Thomas Moran
A Returning
It is Monday afternoon,
and we are newly-arrived
from our distant adventure.
I find that, once more,
I am an old man
gazing out across a river,
cradling a good book,
with a ginger cat drowsing
and dreaming in my lap.
My mind has returned
to tread upon its
faithful and familiar path.
But, the river knows
things I can never know.
The book carries the story
of some other man.
The ginger cat understands
as he always does, for
the benefit of us both,
the essential depths
of contentment.
On a Day Bringing Thunderstorms
It is June and
the leaves of the
sugar maple on
the river’s bank are
beginning a turn to
an autumn crimson.
I think about
polar bears and
snowless slopes
in Switzerland.
I think of fish choking
on warm seawater.
Today, there is a
twist of wind,
along the blue belly
of the Atlantic,
fated to destroy.
I can no longer
distinguish the calling
of songbirds from
the laments of
the weeping wind.
I understand there
are too many things
I can never know,
But the rains are
becoming rivers,
the sunlight a savage.
On the day before
the one which
will be my last, there
will be no more hives
of honey to plunder.
My breaths bear the
smolder of distant fires.
The emptied lakes will
no longer reflect the sky.
For now, on this
perspiring June morning,
it is the blushing leaves
of a lone sugar maple
I find concerning.