LW Poetry

This feature showcases original poems by members of the Creative Writers Club of Leisure World and other GRF members. You’re invited to submit your poetry to the LW Weekly office or pattym@lwsb.com.

The Couple at the Bus Stop

Their hands were joined as one while they sat together close, cocooned inside the covered shelter at the Leisure World bus stop.

Their masks showed the same ornate pattern.

They had been sewn from the same fabric.

Yet it was the way the couple was sitting . . .

pressed together into a unified likeness, that hinted a new beginning of a later-life love.

There had just been another occurrence in the active season of wildfire.

The sun was now a muted orange disc that served as a solitary beacon to mark its remembered place across the empty slate of a featureless sky. Yet the couple at the bus stop gave it no notice. They just sat there waiting . . . fully content within the confines of their own private sanctum, detached from the world around them. Flocks of familiar black birds were flying overhead in curious patterns, each in turn swooping, then ascending, then each returning to their former place in a precise and structured formation, gliding silently in ever widening circles.

The smoke had covered the landscape with a gray dust.

The streets held a new kind of stillness.

Whooshing sounds from local motor traffic had become feeble and cautious; they could scarcely be heard above the heavy silence of midday. Yet this new face of nature that surrounded the couple at the bus stop was a remote outsider that could find no place in their sphere of conscious awareness. But in the peaceful contentment of their self-made isolation, each had become quite skilled in the single-handed operation of their wireless digital gadget.

While their blissful bloom of newness filled the interior of that cozy little bus stop, they just sat there hand in hand . . . each gazing intently at their own personal screen, basking in the aura of its luminescent glow.

David Chute Mutual 14