Kort Ploshay grew up with a telephone party line, the local library, a slide rule (a slight improvement over the abacus) and the US Post Office for communication. Now he designs cutting edge enterprise software solutions for the United States Army. Kort was an active Bard from 1963 through 1975, singing folk songs, writing and publishing music and lyrics, and writing (previously unpublished) poetry and prose. As a Subject Matter Expert for the United States Army he is writing again, which has rekindled his after-hours love of writing in poetry and prose.

An Occasional Waltz

Today, the dance is just outside this dingy airport window

How many times has someone watched the wind
pirouetting a scrap or two of paper
around a drab, colorless corner
of concrete curb and slab

Up for a brief spin, higher and faster,
ever falling back into the waltz

like autumn leaves as they gracefully dance to earth –
these scraps and abandoned wrappers can only fly
in gentle winds
in fleeting eddies
of corner-trapped gusts and breezes

I have watched this same dance throughout my years,
no matter who I thought myself to be
I always found time to pause
and enjoy the Concrete and Corner Occasional Waltz

in empty parking lots, while loading trucks at the docks,
at junctions of forsaken buildings and empty lots
and here today at yet another airport

The dance is always the same

It is only I who change throughout these many years