Donald Wheelock

At the Head of the Line

When they disappear, these older folk,
they make you realize you’re in a line,
your place determined roughly by your age.
How they bunch together up in front,
where you are now! — it makes you loath to look
around you — every day another’s gone.
It happens just like that. Before, they left
less ostentatiously: a relative
way up ahead just jumped the queue, someone
you hardly knew (attention to your seniors
not what it should have been). Just look behind you,
where the heads meld into grey; back there,
they can’t make out a face like yours up here,
or know what it must feel like first in line.

With few up front, the pace increased, the goal,
if hazy, hard to come to grips with. Still, 
standing in the line you do feel chosen,
though envy doesn’t show on any faces
close behind you. At its best, the talk
tends toward the here and now, with hints of those
no longer with us and their precious words,
their thinking gone. How much these people know,
standing here so silently. Because
they know that what they know you could know too.
Just look beside you there:
a girl not ten years old. If only you
could send her back to where a girl belongs.

Poetry, a preoccupation for many years, has taken over Donald Wheelock’s life after a career of teaching and composing concert music. Pulsebeat, Sparks of Calliope, THINK, Blue Unicorn, and many other journals have published his poems. His two full-length books, It’s Hard Enough to Fly and With Nothing but a Nod have been published by Kelsay Books and David Robert Books, respectively.