John Muro

Walk in October

It wasn’t the bright bundles
of leaves that hung like paper
lanterns with stray tassels
of light or the vast poverty of
October skies, nor the fields
speckled with the stubble of
stalks, crumbling stone walls
and oddly shaped gourds that
looked like engorged rose
hips that had tumbled into
the dark culverts of a sodden
earth. Not even the flocks of
tongueless birds, rising and
falling, then reassembling
mid-air like gables, but the
fragrant, ill-begotten wind,
festooned with grains of straw-
dust, lambs-wool yellow, and
infused with the odor of varnish
and the dank rot of shallow
bogs and woodlands that’s
holding me, deep-rooted, fast
to land, certain there’s been
a lessening of distance between
this life and what’s to follow.

A lover of all things chocolate, John Muro is a resident of Connecticut and a graduate of Trinity College, Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut. In the Lilac Hour, his first volume of poems, was published in 2020 by Antrim House, and it is available on Amazon. A two-time, 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, John’s poems have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Barnstorm, Euphony, Grey Sparrow, and Willawaw. His second volume of poems, Pastoral Suite, will be published this spring.