Gone for Winter by Cynthia Sidrane

Walking by the waterless
Flood control tunnel
This early evening in fall
There's no evidence of the
Mexican free-tailed bats
And their nightly mass-exit
Out the gaping concrete mouth
Into the traffic of insects
And the beetled hours
Except a vast emptiness
Heaving from their summer roost
Exhaling dank guano
Into the stillness of desert twilight.


Cynthia Sidrane, Arizona, USA

Solar by Chris Crittenden

a rut of light
locks horns with pines

to loose
mercurial rills of gold,

gold licked and snatched
by manic leaves,

dribbling down
to vulgar shanties of decay.

even the swarth
of the filth that is death

luxuriates and swells,
guzzling the gift

sown from an infernal perch,
ramrodded

through unthinkable cold,
gold

that gilds sapphire,
impregnates green and crystals,

gold to stir
incarnadine cores.


Chris Crittenden, Maine, USA

Dawnsingers by Richard Krepski

Predawn May morn (waking beside you),
I was drawn by an ecstasy of birdsong
To gaze at the glow on the Eastern horizon
And learn the cause of the planet's turning.
It is not gears meshed with Ptolemy's spheres,
Nor Newton's choreography of gravity;
It is the call of birds--
A forcefield of sound at the edge of dawn
Circles the globe like a wave
Engages the sun and torques the earth along.

Then we were part of the song,
But now sounds November's bleak noise.
Lovers and dawnsingers disappear,
Withdraw their crescendoing joys.
The darkness palls, the cold stars stall,
This utter night could stay,
Unless we the remnant all gather and call
To mate our meridian with a new day.


Richard Krepski,  PA, USA

Haiku by Jeffrey Winke

rustle of autumn

permeates

the campfire air

Jeffrey Winke, WI, USA

Outsider by Ian C Smith

Our cat wants to join us where the fire draws.

Hind legs stretched on the step in frosty air

he reaches the doorknob with his fore paws.

But for want of thumbs he’d be in my chair.

Trying to turn the brass he’s as bold as

he cries plaintively (from our point of view)

which we ignore, admiring his pizzazz

from the swelled head of evolution’s queue.

He hones unsheathed claws on carpeted stairs

and although we concede animal rights

springing on bench tops and moulting mog hairs

means he’s shut out even on freezing nights.

If we were small like cats, with him our size

one dark winter evening we’d be his prize.


Ian C Smith, Australia