Poetry by Richard LeDue

The Same

Do caterpillars dream of flight

the same way we fall

in our dreams,

only to wake up,

feeling safe in our belief

that nothing has changed?

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The Closest I’ll Get to a Green Thumb

T.S. Eliot planted a corpse

in his poem,

giving April a metaphorical garden,

where the rain meant more than overly ambitious

nimbostratus clouds, while this poem

makes footprints, hastily tracked 

across a fresh snowy field,

the closest I’ll get to a green thumb-

my lost mitten finding a stern lecture

about the cost of things,

but even in my childhood,

I had no expectations that it would all sprout

into this.

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