I have been waiting all morning,
or perhaps longer, for the light to change,
turn, deepen, transform.
No one else seems to notice.
The birds don’t mind,
flitting across the same light
blue atop the horizon’s pink,
accidental tourists from another land,
a place of miracles and elevation,
furtive, fleeting, quick to retreat
to more familiar climes.
Here there is nothing
but waiting and distance
and the same unending blue.
Scott Owens‘ tenth collection of poetry, Shadows Trail Them Home, is due out from Clemson University Press this fall. His prior work has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Pushcart Prize, the North Carolina Writers’ Network, the North Carolina Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina. His poems have been in Georgia Review, North American Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Poetry East among others. He is the founder of Poetry Hickory, editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and 234, and vice president of the Poetry Council of North Carolina. Born and raised in Greenwood, SC, he teaches at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, NC.
