Herman Sutter
November 8, 2026
From this splintered bench,
through gaps in a weathered
rail, I see below what was
once a creek awash with rains
roiling. Yet on this winter afternoon
with summer’s weary flush
already descending,
I watch the stillness gathering
yet still I feel the want of wanting
only the end of wanting
something I could not name;
incomplete I came to contemplate
a drought-dried creek bed fringed
with winter’s fading drift,
the final brittle flags
of Autumn’s last leafing. Here
I came incomplete and uncertain,
rejected by wife and work
unnecessary to any
despite a life long with longing
only to be needed
and so I sit upon a bench
above a drought-dried creek
seeking what? Perhaps the gaze
of an eyeless thing gazing back at me
but find only remnants of Autumn’s last leafing
rustling in a dying breeze
the fluttering of a plastic bag caught
in the brittle branches
of a leafless tree
and the hush of dead grasses, whispering
it is enough to simply be
but beyond the barren trees
I hear the rolling of the beltway constantly reminding me sometimes it is not.
Herman Sutter (award-winning poet/playwright/essayist) is the author of two chapbooks: Stations (Wiseblood Books) and The World Before Grace (Wings Press), as well as “The Sorrowful Mystery of Racism,” St. Anthony Messenger. His work appears in: The Perch, The Ekphrastic Review, The Langdon Review, Touchstone, The Merton Journal, as well as: Texas Poetry Calendar (2021) & By the Light of a Neon Moon (Madville Press, 2019). His recent manuscript A Theology of Need was long-listed for the Sexton Prize.
