May 13, 2009 / Creative Writing
I watched Rebel Without a Cause on TV late one college night when I learned …
Say it—it was you standing there,
listening to the mute syllables of locusts,
the sudden silence of those leafless trees.
The vacant branches, the deafening
songless fear ever louder in your ears.
Even the nights, abandoned, owls and bats
gone elsewhere. When you strain to swallow,
longing fills your mouth like lost lyrics,
a figure shrouded in the distance,
fields of foreign grasses between.
Some evening, you’ll forget to remember
and hear monkshoods whisper vespers,
and later, the waking sigh of sky-faced lilies.
Then you’ll pull the sheet from your table
and set a spread for spring. A first offering,
a pitcher of well-drawn water and a vase
of mint sprigs you pick and eat, healing
humming in your body, unsealing your grief.
Joy Moore
Joy Moore lives in Tennessee, where she teaches undergraduate writing and interdisciplinary courses, oversees two coffee shops, and leads a music and arts venue. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Hunger Mountain, South Carolina Review, and Prairie Schooner, where she won a Glenna Luschei award.