Issue 4:1 I Poetry I Stephen Roberts

Three Poems by Stephen Roberts

Wind Blows the Grass Green

for my father

As far back as ten thousand years ago,

Indians living in southwest Virginia chiseled

The stone chert into arrowheads.

On Easter Monday, our group hiked up,

Twisted our orange ribbon onto limbs and trunks.

The night before, the Hale-Bopp comet rocked

My father and me on his porch.

Shrill mountain wind froze our hands

And our noses ran. Leaves hissed and whistled,

Limbs and trunks creaked and groaned.

Off Wing
for my father

Wearing only his shorts and Ray-Bans

The ex-footballer in trance

Hunches in his ex-tailback stance,

Head swung low listening to the radio’s static constant

As the pair of cocktail glasses

Lean one into the other in long grass,

Gonads hung low out of his shorts

Like knots of barbed wire, planes overhead

Too numerous for any to land, his thought process

Become a yellow yolk of sun breaking

Beyond the purple ridge, hoot

Owl’s wings drooped

Across the fence, Desist, he whispers,

Black-eared, bug-eyed and beaked.

Wild Evening

Against the empty wagon’s steel-belted,

Wood-spoked wheel slumps a yellow, wet bale,

And on its top sprouted a lone oak seedling.

Every April, earth’s most innocent creatures perish.

Death stays the biggest cliché as my Jeep

Backs over the baby rabbit on my driveway.

Four young deer cringed at the edge of the shrub-wedged field,

Water lilies are void of any decorative intent

And bend to listen as my twelve-gauge annihilates

The baby snapping turtle my rod reeled in.

From the thicket, hook snared in its beak,

A great blue heron lunges upward.

If misery is a proxy for God’s mercy,

We will lose these oaks.