Having Nothing to Say

isn't such a bad thing
after all
what can be built
with words but a trim
pollinated affluence
diluted on a breeze.

Here I am again
with paper, pencil
waiting at an open window.
Moss grows
on the shaded side of an oak.
It drops a piece of branch.

I live in a very small town.
An older gentleman
silent even before his wife died
walks home from the convenience store
with a few necessities.

Rain stops.
He steps from lotus to lotus.


Maybe It Should Go Unnoticed

this space between my face
and those birds raising havoc
in my neighbor's yard.

Maybe what's unexplainable
shouldn't be explained
the light
in a miner's eye
the smell of revolution
on a factory floor.

Every day, random things
are spelled backwards.
Only yesterday a diesel
hauled porcelain dolls
over a rutted mountain road
wiping out
a lost hiker's footprints.

Even this ink, you know
is just air.
Less, probably.

John Harn has been involved in international education for 25 years. He currently works in international admissions at Pacific University in Oregon. He has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and has published poems in the following magazines: Carolina Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Red Rock Review, Northwest Review, Cutbank, Kansas Quarterly, Silverfish Review, Wisconsin Review, Poet and Critic, California Quarterly, Red Cedar Review.