Noiseless Sky
by James Piatt
In the noiseless sky,
blue as a sapphire’s facets,
nowhere is there
the metallic thunder of planes
slicing through scudding clouds
of gray,
The faint echoes
of autos
that once were groaning
like metallic turtles
as they crept along highways
in the far distance,
now almost silent.
The days are left with a
melancholy suspended
in time and space, and
in empty streets,
only minute traces
are seen of the hordes that once
visited shops, and cafes;
the businesses
now closed, that are
waiting
for a safe morning
to thrive again,
nothing seems to make sense anymore
to those used to instant gratification
in a past era of excess Hedonism
where buying was cherished,
The empty city’s landscape,
stark, lonely,
wide avenues once filled with cars,
now only ambulances carrying
the almost dead,
speeding to a hospital
filled with ventilators,
can be heard
in the eeriness of the void
by the infrequent human walking down
the sidewalk,
wearing a mask,
and wondering
where did his world go,
Above his head,
dark clouds
holding cold drops of moisture
hang listlessly in the noiseless sky,
sky where echoes of mumbled words
were once sent upwards
from wooden pews in the nave
of a church,
a church where old bronze bells
once
signaled morning mass…
but no more.
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James Piatt, a poet and writer from Santa Ynez, California, is a Best of Web nominee and three time Pushcart nominee. He has had poems published by Backchannels, Front Porch Review, Page & Spine, Miller's Pond, American Aesthetic, TreeHouse, El Portal, The Seventh Quarry, Poetry Magazine.com, Dagda, and hundreds of others. His fifth collection of poetry Serenity, will be released this month. He earned his BS and MA from California State Polytechnic University, SLO, and his doctorate from BYU.