The Fall Stream
I walk along a fall stream,
the slower, shallower currents
run clear, the bones of the river
reflecting up into the sky.
The turbidities have flushed,
the casket lid of ice is unformed,
the turbulences and pairings
that lead to damaging excess
have receded into memory.
The lingering calm will hopefully
flow beneath the winter storms.
Spectres
Ghosts are not persons.
They’re the haunting echoes
of encounters and confrontations,
of passions and hatreds with those
once close to whom we refuse death,
the reverberations of intense identity
with our lives that we cannot neglect.
We are our own apparitions.
He died too young and lived not well enough.
His judgement often overcome by need,
his journey punctuated by rebuff,
his hopes contorted by decree.
His children think of him, perhaps, sometimes.
Coworkers never pull him into thought
except perhaps to recollect his crimes.
His friends among the living few and fraught.
And I, perhaps his closest friend had left
And in the moving shuttered off our lives,
unmindful of his being more bereft
amid the cuts of disappointing knives.
His living and his passing sank unread
except for we who knew the modest dreams
he chased without attainment until dead,
a voyager swept away by swirling streams.
Cross Talk
Pets talk to their people
in pantomime with sound effects.
Not the lower order captives-
snakes and rabbits and falcons.
They view us as feeding stations.
But the dogs and monkeys, and horses
cats and pigs and maybe bears
all are able to tell us off.
Not in words, for to them
words are just carriers of emotion.
But they know the gooey sounds
of human to animal affection,
the threatened punishment
in loud and harsh staccatos,
and the body language which
means they’re being lied to
And they talk back to us
in silent movie pantomime
of raised hackles and arched backs
paired with yowls, howls and purrs
and occasional bites and scratches.
We learn slowly, but eventually
we can know their mood
in a single glance.
Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over three hundred stories and poems published so far, and six books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of nine review editors.
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