Walking Among the Last Crickets by Martin Willitts Jr

Walking Among the Last Crickets

This lost summer of vegetables,
Fall brings elongated shadows,
where perhaps, dead souls guide us.

Our world glides towards silence.
Too many unspoken words.
What does the dead say about the afterlife?

Is there one? Or many choices of afterlife,
like leaves turning Fall’s rust color?
This might be when time matters most.

This might be when we need to use time better.
This begins the lessening of light.
I wish all of this were reversable.

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Martin Willitts Jr is editor for Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022; He won the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize. His 24 full-length collections include Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” including all 36 color pictures (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Selected Poems” (FutureCycle Press, 2024). He won the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize for “One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away in Search of Peace”. Forthcoming is “Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence” (Bainbridge Island Press, 2026).