Featured Contributor ~ Poetry
Peter A. Witt is a Texas Poet and a retired university professor. He also writes family history with a book about his aunt published by the Texas A&M Press. His poetry has been published on various sites including Fleas on the Dog, Inspired, Open Skies Quarterly, Active Muse, New Verse News, and WryTimes.
Even Though
I still smile at people, laugh at their jokes,
even though I can feel the light fading,
even on the sunniest of days, even though
my smile conceals a sad concern for words
that seem to escape my memory,
and laughs come more from habit
than my belly, even though my dog wants
to go for a walk and the best I can do is open
the back door and let him patrol the yard,
even though I pass a lot of gas and
ignore people’s stares and head shakes,
even though the phone rings and I answer
and talk endlessly to a foreign accented man
who knows my name and is trying to sell me
an extended warranty for a car I totaled last year,
even though my children never call except
to warn me about telephone scams, even though
they’ve taken away my checkbook and credit cards,
and don’t want to tell me they’re moving me
to a place that will bathe and feed me on a regular
schedule, where the staff all have pasted smiles,
and laugh at my jokes, even though I spend
most of the time alone in my room, get up late
and go to bed early, even though I play bingo
and don’t know if I’ve won, even though
children come to sing for us at Christmas
and I fall asleep during silent night.
Aging and other adventures I am not prepared for
Over the years my mind filled with trivia,
the size of the federal budget, who won
the 2015 world series, names of the actors
who starred in Gone with the Wind, who
ran for president in 1972, how many bird
species have been identified in Texas.
The list of hapless mind fillers is endless,
the stored information exhausting,
until one day my mind said enough,
time to move on, time to concentrate
on the little things in my daily existence,
the sound of an early morning bird
tweeting outside my bedroom window,
the feel of my finger caressing my wife’s cheek,
the stories my grandchildren recount
about their school day.
I could have kept count of the number
of birds I’d seen, how many times my granddaughter,
Sally, felt some schoolmate disrespected her,
but no, I abstain, involving myself
in the here and now, each happening
a new adventure, as the past and yesterday
slip slowly away from my grasp.