Poems by Paul Suter

BACK IN TIME FOR JUST ONE DAY
CAN HEAL YOU AND ME AND THE WORLD

Robins’ song first thing this morning.
Squirrel pursuing a squirrel
through the dogwood and beech trees,
risky leaps, one almost a success.

Girl, six, runs behind mother and father
pushing the new baby in a carriage. Big sister
swings around metal pole of parking sign.

Boy, six, on his bicycle,
with his mother and father in city park,
a steep path down, he negotiates it perfectly.

Blocks from home, I’m hailed by an acquaintance
from across a street. She wants to tell me
everything about her husband’s non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.
Almost breathless, So far, radiations have been successful.

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REFORMING THE SIDEWALK

Public Works removes the old, lays out the new.
Teams dig, scrape, form, fill, and level,
call in the mix of cement, sand and gravel,
handle shiners, muckrakers, bull floats,
edgers, steel trowels, fresnos,
making a fractured way smooth,
honed and grooved.

They eye the wet cement like Bocci gamers
planning an arching toss
toward the pallino.

They deliberate like curlers concentrating
on the gentle slide of stone
toward the mark.

They are sidewalk players
recasting the cracked,
the crushed, the tilted, the broken.