Michael Ratcliffe: Five Poems

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CLAUDIA GREETS ME IN THE MORNING

Claudia greets me in the morning

with coffee and half a smile,

eyes downcast somewhere

between sadness and a different place.

I am there also,

only closer to sadness,

knowing no other place to be.

I stare out the café window,

at all the purposeful people

on their way to purposeful days;

it hurts to look at them

in the morning sun’s glare,

so I follow Claudia

as she shuttles between tables and kitchen,

taking orders, pouring coffee,

delivering food,

while the manager shouts her round the restaurant—

“Claudia, pick up!”

“Claudia, new customer!”

“Claudia, clear that table over there!”

Claudia looks my way.

I sense a glance that says

take me away from here,

take me to another place,

and I want the same from her,

but neither of us says a word

as Claudia pours me another cup of coffee.

DEAD ROSES

Dead roses lie on the table,

still bundled as they came from the store,

for want of water, they withered.

RAIN FALLS FROM THE SOMBER SKY

Rain falls from a somber sky,

our parched world now made green again.

The lawn sheds the brown of summer’s drought,

and resumes a green that again will fade.

When I saw you at summer’s end,

my garden greened again.

Then, I met him at your house, and now I know

that what never was, will never be.

The rain blasts the peach tree’s last leaves to garden,

where they mingle with the rotting pits of summer.

The rain-letting rage of the fractured sky brings autumn,

harbinger of winter’s gun-metal death.

A hard rain falls from a somber sky,

spring’s green merely a dream;

autumn’s barrenness, reality.

READING LI PO ON A WINTER DAY

Sitting in the brown rocking chair

next to the window in my bedroom

waiting for the afternoon sun to stream in again,

I read Li Po.

Cold wind gusts outside,

whips round the eaves,

rattles the front door.

Outside the window, a shutter flaps against the house—

the same shutter I thought would fall off last year.

The afternoon sun streams through the window.

AGE PARES THE FRUIT OF LIFE

Age pares away the fruit of life,

to the heart,

to the kernel of spirit,

to be sown anew in the second spring.

The parts once thought tastiest

now lie discarded,

no longer digestible;

they do the soul no good.

The seed,

though hard and once thought bitter,

now is prized,

for it contains new life. 


Michael Ratcliffe writes in the suburbs of Baltimore and Washington.  He has had poems published in You Are Here:  The Journal of Creative Geography (U.S.), Little Patuxent Review (U.S.), and Do Not Look at the Sun (France).  His poems can also be found on his blog at http://skiminocycle.blogspot.com/