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"Like Memories in Mid-Air" and "You Give Them a Cookie ...," poems by Frederick Michaels


Like Memories In Mid-Air
by Frederick Michaels

We have grown to be so old
(right before our very eyes),
yet, despite the years compiled,
not emerged as very wise.

We let time just melt away,
pass right by without disguise.
In a steady drip of hours,
years have dematerialized.

We’re like footprints we impress
into freshly fallen snow,
leading backward through our past
There’s no better place to go.

What we are, or might become,
none can tell and none can know,
as our tracks begin to vanish,
oft times fast, sometimes slow.

And the snowflakes fall like memories in mid air,
concealing lives which were not really there.


You Give Them A Cookie ...
by Frederick Michaels

Deer crowd into my doorway,
peering right into my kitchen
like a posed Norman Rockwell,
but with a plaintive, hungry gaze.

A doe and three curious fawns,
in great Halloween costumes.
Kids have a dumbfounded look
as mom ventures inward alone.

I imagine a proper British accent.
It just seems so very appropriate.
Might I trouble you for snacks?
The family and I are famished!”

The siren call of baking cookies
has summoned their arrival,
overcome their survival instincts
and fear of a fur-less, upright man.

Woodland visitors are infrequent,
so I’m grateful for the intrusion.
A plate wafting scents of vanilla
tempts the fawns to join mother.

Baked offerings fully consumed,
all but the mother scamper out
like children do at a recess bell,
anxious to be first for hopscotch.

The doe strides towards the door,
parading head high, then stops,
sighs “next time, tea please” and
exits proudly, like a grande dame.

Frederick Michaels writes in retirement from his home in Indianapolis. His poetry has appeared in Flying Island, So It Goes Literary Journal, The Boston Poetry Journal, Branches magazine, The Australian Times and Lone Stars magazine, among others. A number of his poems appear in the Reckless Writing 2012 and 2013 anthologies (Chatter House Press, Indianapolis), Naturally Yours (Stacy Savage and Kathy Chaffin Gerstorff, printed in Charleston, S.C., 2013), Words and Other Wild Things (Brick Street Poetry, Zionsville, Ind., 2016), and Paw Prints in Verse (Stacy Savage, printed in Lexington, Ky., 2017). His first collection of poems, Potholes In The Universe, was published in 2016 by Chatter House Press, Indianapolis. An engineer by training, Michaels has always been pulled to the side of the arts by his love of language. He would say that the words are always there, they just need to be put in the proper order.