~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Robert S. King

After My Better Half Left

Do the dead take their time to leave home?

Why else would such weather call me out

to hear the wind chimes and the soft fall

of embroidered snowflakes, where the heart

of winter sounds like our song

that I've never gotten out of my head.

Then there is the calm before another storm,

a focus where the last snowflakes fall like stars.

where moonbeams shove the clouds aside,

and I am circled by footprints in the snow—

you left them, I believe. I cannot believe

it's me who forever walks in circles to find you.

There’s Always Another Earth

We the evolutionary bluebloods,

we the ruling consumers of this blue globe

also hold the stars at our fingertips.

We of high minds and money

are entitled to warp space

the way the dying winds moan

that we have warped earth.

We have lots of artificial intelligence, plenty

of high-tech, spacetime, and spaceship

to mine planet after planet and escape

the shockwaves of their death rattles.

So what if one after another burns

in our ship's rearview mirrors.

So what if skulls of dead worlds

float across our bows.

Robert S. King lives in Athens, GA, where he serves on the board of FutureCycle Press. His poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Hollins Critic, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, Negative Capability, Southern Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He has published eight poetry collections, most recently Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014) and Messages from Multiverses (Duck Lake Books, 2020). His personal website is www.robertsking.info