A Summer Day at Noontime (July 27, 2022)*

I had been sitting in my car thinking, talking to self:

old man, you’ve locked yourself outside my house.

Soon I find that “self” lounging in my back yard

in a state of what’s next. I have no book at hand,

not expecting anyone coming home

at least not until 4 PM and I am

now only at a quarter to noon time.

Is this not the proper place and hour for contemplation?

As I sit under the maple tree in my backyard 

I am tracking black ants skittering in the grass. 

Should I count them? I have the time.

It did rain yesterday, so perhaps

this is why the formic are now dancing

in the newly dried backyard greenery,

the moisty ground, and on my trousers.

Sometimes I can feel them

streaking up my skinny legs, not in hunger

but in exploration, perhaps just curiosity.

Soon the sun will reach its daily apogee

and the tint of heaven is mostly a true azure

with a horizontal stretch of silent clouds in the western sky

lacing wisps floating here and there and everywhere.

To the East my eyes capture three small

sailing fluffs slowly dispersing as they tower upward.

The lower one is Z-shaped, the other two almost O’s.

But all are slowly stretching mist streams as

mystic umbrellas, in the direction of the Omaha Zoo.

Would you believe that this was

soon becoming a sign forever captured

by the camera of my mind?

*Author’s note: What to do when you have nothing else to do: write!

A poem from my unpublished nebraskamusing collection Guadalupe J. Mier