By: Richard LeDue

“The First Snow of Another Winter”

Vivaldi’s mandolin still whispers to me
about those afternoons
sitting alone in my parents’ living room,
looking outside and only seeing
inside myself,
so sure no one was listening
that I could never imagine
writing this poem years later,
confounded by how a concerto changed
from meaning loneliness
to keeping me company
on grey haired nights.

“Sundance At Dusk”

Pages falling out of this old book,
as if the library knew what it was doing
discarding a poetry collection from 1976
by a writer who seems more alive
smoking his cigar
in the black and white photo on the back cover
than inside those loose yellowing pages
or in all the sunsets he never saw,
illuminating the ghosts of his immortality.

“Nothing But Old Age”

Why is Bach warning me
about Monday to Friday,
if Henry Ford invented the weekend
(or popularized it
according to Google)?

Yet I can hear it:
the minutes, hours, weeks, months,
years measured by salaries, taxes,
preapproved credit limit increases,
retirement savings as regular
as pains they say are nothing
but old age,
while the music, without any words,
tells my grey hair
there’s so much more to life.

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Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He writes poems. His last collection, “Another Another,” was released from Alien Buddha Press in May 2025.