Mother Goose Revisited
At the corner of the bricked-in lane, / she speaks to us through a vine-covered fence / in the vegetation-stripped yard / where she tends to eight variegated geese / you can smell from half a block away.
She says she knows they are nasty / but it gives her something to do. / She is probably close to eighty. / There are worse things, she says, than keeping geese, / and one of them is loneliness.
Gerry Sloan is a retired music professor living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. His collections are Paper Lanterns (Half Acre Press, 2011) and Crossings:A Memoir in Verse (Rollston Press, 2017), both available on Amazon, plus five chapbooks, including one in Mandarin. Recent work appears in Slant, Nebo, Cantos, Xavier Review, Arkansas Review, Cave Region Review (featured poet), and Elder Mountain (featured poet). For more information: gsloan@uark.edu.
