Bob Wright

It's Not About

It's not about goals, and
plans, and priorities.

And it's not about what
to do with the rest of your life.
Or all your obligations.

It's about holding on, as best
you can, to that very special
person. The one you think
about so constantly. The
one you meld with always
without effort.

It's about holding on, some-
how, for just a few more hours,
and letting all the rest arrange
itself.


A Thousand Birds

I walk out through the dead
leaves and hear a thousand birds
chattering in the trees as they
pause on their way south. Should
I envy them their having somewhere
to go and someone to take them
on their long journey, these
creatures of the sky who know
what it is to soar? Who know
what it is to congregate? To stay
faithful? To raise a family?

I wonder, do they dream of other
birds in other times? Keep and
break promises? Long for
things? Or simply chatter and
fly and eat and live and die without
the pang of regret or even some
small satisfaction? How bittersweet
it must be to be bird, just as it is
to not be.


This Other Dimension

He would be talking what seem-
ed like English, and making
what seemed like reasonable
points, but whatever he was
saying never got to where it
was supposed to get.

For she'd start to talk as though
he had said nothing, or had said
something with so little value that it
wasn't worth acknowledging.

He tried to listen to what she
was saying, but it seemed as
though to understand it he would
have to trace every word in every
sentence back to some beginning
that had started long before the
two of them, and he sensed that
the thread was just too long to
follow.

He only wanted to make two or
three simple points. So he kept
repeating them.

But in this other dimension, where
everyone spoke but no one was
able to listen, where every question
that required just a simple yes or
no received in place of that another
question, he knew that he might
just as well stop.


About the Author

Bob Wright, who has lived in Woodstock, New York, and currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, has been writing poetry for some 40 years. Some of his poetry is available on Amazon.

He is one of the founders of the Woodstock Poetry Society and for six years acted as coordinator at most of its monthly meetings. Until recently he hosted a poetry venue in Dunnellon, Florida, and before that in Athens, New York. He served at one point as president of the Stone Ridge Poetry Society, in Stone Ridge, New York; was a poetry editor for that group's literary quarterly, Oxalis (a nationally recognized magazine that was profiled in Poet's Market); and helped put on an annual event called "Day of the Poet" at Ulster County Community College, which drew entrants from three states for its oral poetry contest. He was active in the Alchemy Club (a poetry group formed many decades ago in Grahamsville, New York); performed for a poetry performance series based in New Paltz, New York; and for several years put on an annual poetry benefit for the Woodstock Artists Association. He is published in a number of notable literary journals and has attended and read at poetry venues throughout the Hudson Valley and in central Florida. For some 10 years he was the curator for the Hudson Valley Poetry Calendar, a fairly comprehensive listing of poetry events in the Hudson Valley, which was discontinued at the end of 2012. He has been a featured reader at local colleges, bookstores, libraries, and cultural centers and has conducted poetry workshops at several colleges and summer camps.

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