Windows
By Roberta Gould
They extend the days
Our ancestors lacked them
Behind walls of wattle or mud
They slept long
Not prodded by the sun
and stepped out
to dawn’s silhouette of trees
They praised their walls rightly
unable to equal the power of winter
or the blaze of the summer sun
Confined briefly behind walls now
in clothes of our choosing
our modern floors keep the earth out
worms we pretend don’t exist
and the infinite creatures soaring above
invisible to us
Leisure
By Roberta Gould
The pleasure of walking slowly
With nowhere to go
Happy to waddle the streets
With no one along
To plod foot to foot
giving each side its due
sitting and staring
into nothing at all
To doze without knowing
awake with a start
touched by the sky
its rain pouring down
Roberta Gould's poetry taught Romance languages for 20 years at Brooklyn College and briefly at the University of California in Berkeley. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry Now, Catholic Worker, California Quarterly, Milkweed Chronicle, Mid American Review, Jewish Currents, Green Mountain Review, Confrontation, Helicon Nine, Naugatuck River Review, Socialism and Democracy, The Art and Craft of Poetry, among other literary publications, and in anthologies including Mixed Voices, A Slant of Light, Up the River.
Her most recent books include Woven Lightning, (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2019) Talk When You Can, Tell the Truth (Presa Press, 2019)
Trolley c/o NYS Writers Institute
Science Library 320
University at Albany
Albany NY 12222
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