Richard Luftig And Still

And Still

it is empty on these city streets where taxis once lined up and down at traffic lights, horns blaring like alarm clocks, if only people had any place to go.

It is still empty in every small town in Iowa and Illinois where storefronts are shuttered now and maybe for good, these places where crops have been plowed under and the feed store has no one to gather inside in the early chill to drink coffee, dark and thick as motor oil collecting in the engine pans of tractors that haven’t been started in months.

And it is still early on my street, where houses sit so quiet until I hear later in the morning, a piano played by a young girl through the open window

three doors down: The first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, as she waits for her lesson which she is sure will begin again some time soon.

Richard Luftig

Richard Luftig is a retired professor of educational psychology at Miami University in Ohio who now resides in California. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally. His full-length book of poems is entitled A Grammar for Snow.