Still Life of Frog and Stone by Jason Ryberg
Here’s a single petal from
someone’s prize-winning rosebushes,
floating down the gutter on a river
of rainwater from a thunderstorm
whose giant eye seems to be calmly and
curiously focused upon us for the moment,
and here’s a frog knocking on a stone
at the bottom of someone else’s
overgrown garden pond,
its ear pressed against it
as if waiting, for what, exactly?
A giant chorus of cicadas, sounding
almost like concrete saws, tries to
kick-start their machines, prematurely,
but the storm shuts them down again. Hard.
Jason Ryberg is the author of thirteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders,notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He lives part-time in Salina, KS with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.