I am taken by this silence.
A prop-plane’s sputter fades to the west,
and I am left
with nothing
but a solitary sycamore,
in the rising sunlight. Nearby
a cardinal whistles.
It’s so still here that I feel
my world
gently drift
on its molten sea beneath me.
The slightest ripple in the creek ’s
mirror-flat pool is a call-and-response
to the slip of rock, the earth quaking
a thousand miles away. Above me,
the cardinal lights on the thickest limb
of the white-barked tree.
The branch bends imperceptibly
as the sun ticks one more second
across an impossibly blue sky.
The Cessna reappears, putters overhead,
passes its dark shadow over me.
Dick Westheimer
Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have recently appeared in Whale Road Review, Innisfree Journal, Gyroscope Review, Banyan Review, Rattle, Ritual Well, One Art and Cutthroat. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig.
More at www.dickwestheimer.com
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