Thursday 30 May 2019

A Portrait of Wilbur by JD DeHart

Sbrools at the English language


Just as one poet
once wrote about a last
duchess, so did the poet
write about the first Wilbur.

The brown clothing, smell
of moth balls, scent of age
of rows of books that Wilbur
rested within.

You have to wonder –
did he read all those books,
are they in progress, or are they
simply stacked like a protective
barrier, never opened?

Empty glass bottles
that suggest some dismay.

A clip of speech that
played with a Southern accent,
these days
it’s hard to find someone
named Wilbur.

Sunday 26 May 2019

It Was the Nineteen Fifties by John Grey

1950s Gloucester, MA Family
by Glenn from West Virginia, USA
[CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]


No sin.
Crewcuts for the boys and the lawns.
Underwear hidden from plain sight.

Busy church.
Busy business.
Everyone younger
the image of everybody older.

Marriage for life.
Religion for that and more.

So Samuel Marsh
battered his wife to death
with a tire iron.

He never laid a hand
on anybody else’s wife.

*****

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Midwest Quarterly, Poetry East and North Dakota Quarterly with work upcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, Hawaii Review and the Dunes Review.