Rodd Whelpley
An Unrhymed Sonnet of the Everyday
There's music in it. The scratchy slide
of a guitarist changing chords. My thumb
across the page corners of a book. Scenes
from the passenger seat. Trees by the freeway
in clumpy groups, their red-jacket backs hunched
against traffic, like smokers ditching school.
The low, sunrise gold in a cut cornfield.
Syllables invested in your next
unanswerable question. Or at home,
ripening on the kitchen counter –
two angry, bantam-weight tomatoes
taken in for fear of frost, pinch-faced, jealous,
as ready as those pumpkins left outside
to face their half-moon chances in the night.
Bio
Rodd Whelpley is a young poet, but an old man, who, by day, runs an electric efficiency program for 32 municipal utilities in Illinois. His work has appeared in Menacing Hedge, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, 2River View, *82 Review, Black Napkin Press, Spillway, The Chagrin River Review and other journals.