Drought
Drought
By Diane Moomey
You could, fed up
with red and blue flashing lights
and sickened by the siren howls
of human misery that never stop, could
slip through any window and follow
the thread back to Narnia.
You could
backtrack your own trail
and know that, had you turned north
in 1981 instead of west, he might
have said “yes” and you might now
be sitting in a different chair.
Or not.
Or you could, reflecting upon lawns
and empty lakes and on the vanishings
of certain birds, either slide into a glass
with ice, or, ranting, take to the streets
and by now, both those roads will lead
to the same place.
It’s been such a long drought. So many
things were never born.
A regular reader at San Francisco Bay Area poetry venues, Diane Moomey has published prose and poetry, most recently in Mezzo Cammin, Glass: a Journal of Poetry; The Sand Hill Review, California Poetry Quarterly, Caesura and Red Wheelbarrow, and has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. She won first prize and an Honorable Mention in the Sonnet category of the 2016 Soul Making Keats Literary Contest, and first prize in the Creative Non-Fiction category of the same competition. To read more, visit https://www.pw.org/content/diane_moomey