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Richard Luftig
Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020
An Old Ladder
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Richard Luftig
Twenty feet long, lying in the weeds. Shedding its skin in splinters from the years. Each of its step-grids yield a hopscotch for rabbits, a needed plat for slugs to explore silted treasures below.
Bend down close, get to eye level. See its perspective like a vanishing point of a spur-line railroad track that once led to some silo or barn or factory, long torn up, torn down, dreams
that people who lived here must have dreamed of but which never came to pass. And still, this ancient wood hangs on, each rung pressed to the chest of this rich, flat earth, waiting, no, yearning, to prop up a life again.
[This poem was first published in Oasis]
Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in California. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post-Corbett Foundation Award for Literature. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. Two of his poems recently appeared in Ten Years of Dos Madres Press.
