Syllabics

(C) R.L.K.

1.
The first few leaves
always seem to
fall the hardest.
Here, in this small
park, you watch them
tumble down, and
think: what a short
while summer is;
the thrush, the lush
grass, the roses
suddenly gone.

2.
Autumn is just this
wind, just these poor last
lost torn leaves dancing
in the wind, just this
sad old man watching
the poor last lost torn
leaves dance in the wind.

Another Tune For A Lonesome Traveler

(C) R.L.K.

It has to begin somewhere;
perhaps in a motel room with the window open,
sunup, wisps of mists outside, trees swaying in the wind.

You hear an old song on an old radio -
“Can’t help but wonder where I’m bound” -
and you do, even now you do.

Days, months, years have passed,
melody after melody has faded into a distant echo,
and still you wonder.

So many roads: the long and winding
road, the road to the interior,
the road that has no name.

"All that road rolling and all those
people dreaming in the immensity of it.”
And always, the road not taken.

Can’t help but wonder, though, if
at the end all roads merge into one:
the road that you leads you home.

Two Haiku

(C) R.L.K.

1.
The wind of autumn
Blows chilly all day and yet
The scarecrow smiles.

2.

As the evening falls,
I realize just how much
Has returned to the wind.

Tell Me What It Is Later

--The Mystique of Modal Jazz--
(C) R.L.K.

Call it kind of blue,
melancholy beauty in a horn,
wailing for a long-lost friend;

play it on the lamplit corner,
of a lonely street,
over the sound of rustling leaves

and haunted things
like long trains rolling
through the rainy night.

An Autumn Morning

(C) R.L.K.

Last night's rain is a memory.
Now, only a few clouds pass,
white as empty pages.
The maples atop the hill
sway lightly in the wind
and, from somewhere, not far away,
comes the soft song of some small bird.

Somehow

(C) R.L.K.

It just happens: late in the day,
when leaf shadows tremble in half-light,
nostalgia comes out of nowhere
to carry you away. Slowly,
a lone cloud skims the treetops.
The low sun etches shadows on the sidewalks.

It just happens: the night descends,
and with the night, comes the thought
that there is always another shoebox full
of old photographs to sort through
while crickets chirp outside and you
grow older with every chirp.

Only Then

(C) R.L.K.

It is the moment you pause
for poetry, the moment you stop
beneath the fading moon,

the moment the wind sighs,
leaf shadows tremble in new light,
and morning mist hugs the hillside,

the moment to seize a rhyme,
sublime for a time, the moment that soars
like a sparrow twinkling its wings in daring flight.