poems by John Grey

Refugees

 

Some people

can’t stay where they are.

As determined by

no home, empty pockets

and ragged clothes,

they have to be moving.

 

So they fall in

with a line already formed,

nudge forward

at the pace of the one ahead,

the one behind.

 

Each step

is one farther away from war,

nearer to the next callus.

 

 

 

In a local coffee shop

 

The teenage boy

in jeans and blue sweater,

wearing glasses,

and with a trace of acne

around the chin

 

occasionally glances

at a teenage girl

with long brown hair,

and braces

at a nearby table.

 

Maybe he

finds her attractive.

Maybe he’s just

practicing how to glance.

 

 

 

A country boy in a big city bar

 

A dazzling patch of ripe tomatoes.

Enough red to get a bull riled up.

For a man in t-shirt and faded jeans,

nirvana is local and farm-fresh..

 

Rough hands shaking loose a fork full of hay.

A willing jockey high up in a tractor’s saddle.

In a big-city bar, no one knows this of you.

Alcohol and neon are the biggest liars going.

 

Some woman clings to your right arm’s muscle.

She has no idea of your sinew’s source.

You’re a total stranger to her. In a fancy bar,

you don’t even know yourself all that well.

 

Her assessment of you is cursory.  In her eyes,

you’re awkward but attractive. And it’s a relief

to her that, unlike the others in the bar, you lack

sarcasm, can’t spit a spray of caustic zingers.

 

But you refuse to be looked down upon.

You have land, a substance that eludes the Wall

Street types. It’s an extension of your skin. There’s

soil under your nails for a reason. You muck out stalls.

 

You shovel horse manure. But you’ve seen the

best of what can grow. You live with what your hands

can do. Sure, the woman’s attractive. There’s something

of a rain-shower in her, the kind thar breaks a drought.

 

In the country, you don heavy boots

because you don’t trust cow patties.

Here, you wear your one pair of good shoes.

You’re beginning to like what you’re standing in.

 

 

 

After the wedding

 

The first night departed, first morning likewise,

and then some days, and then some more.

We survived the first phase of our wedded selves,

by believing, so intensely, the mirage.

 

And it was there whenever we reached out to it.

First year, passion interspersed with discovery.

In the second, we came out of occasional storms

crying like gulls, but returning dutifully to the nest.

 

We no more hungered outside the two of us.

We made a home like an island off shore,

that was, at first, startled to be there

but, eventually, settled into its sleepy waters.

 

We never thought how much our single lives

perished the moment we each said “I do.”

The bird that soars but ends up later

as a roadside feast for carrion crows

 

never made it as a correlation.

Whether we’re together or alone, we look

like people who are always in each other’s company.

We are strange to all who haven’t married yet.

 

 

 

Six months into a drought

 

Across aging sky, clouds appear

with all their music inside them,

immortal songs that these ears

barely remember, rehearsed in the lab

or in heaven, to be sung, we dare hope,

by this particular choir –

 

for water feels the same thirst

as the soil that calls to it

but can give no clue to its intent,

only its location, floating above land

where farmers sow seed in clear conscience,

pray, in one silence, to science or to God,

for reclamation or, better yet,

a premature resurrection.