Broadway @ Corona

While the landscape is noticing its shifting soul,
I am seeing the love struck bee
aquiver under the poppy’s flirty, little skirt.

In the tree above, the city squirrel eyeing me
shakes his brown bottlebrush,
and peels his tangerine.

Down Corona, among the apartment-dwellers,
the woeful Argentinean croons to her hound,
who answers in the sweeter tone.

And on Broadway, the school bus rumbles,
the grinning boy leaning out the open window
screams “mother fucker!”

I lean back in the brittle, wintry weeds, as the afternoon purples,
as the gull floats home to the strand, crossing the slice of new moon
and suddenly everything becomes Chekhovian-clear.

Has this ever happened to you?
when the stars are words and the sky a poem
saying you must consider how you have wasted this life?

Bonnie Bolling