Raise Your Hand
By R James Sennett Jr

 

and your fingers
will be broken.
Never to hold a fork,
wave to the neighbor,
snap your fingers,
pet your dog,
touch your child.
Hobbled
making your way
with tactile blindness.
Is feeling gone?
Groping in darkness
inch by inch
hoping for the familiar.
Never pointing upward
to the sky?

 

Reckon

We reckon
maybe 3 dozen squirrels
have died since we moved in.
Various traumas:
apex yard preditors;
automobiles;
mange;
age.
Seasonal, it seems.
All in their time.
We hardly get to know you
before you’re memory.
Feeding them fed us.
Always looking
for the next generation
greeting us with
another permutation
of the universe’s face.

 

For R James Sennett Jr from US, nipping at the heels like a pup way too attentive, poetry has pursued this word student all his life. The muse has a funny way of showing up when it wants to make its presence known. He can do no other but to follow. Publications include The Louisville Review, The Thinker Review, The Birmingham Poetry Review, LOU Today, The Taj Mahal Review, The Journal of Expressive Writing and Poetry Superhighway. Publications pending with The Main Street Rag, Rundelania, DarkWinter Literary Magazine and Poetry Pacific.