~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Larry D. Thomas

Johnson Grass

Like giant green asterisks

footnoting the efficacies

of persistence, it thrives

in Louisiana yards

by the creeping spread

of thick rhizomes, tough

as deep-sea fishing line.

Even hallowed St. Augustine,

notorious for choking out

a host of recalcitrant weeds,

doesn’t faze it,

its basketball-sized root balls

so remarkably adept

at probing the depths of hell

that veteran yard men

of extraordinary strength,

on the heels of a slow, deep rain,

may succeed in pulling it up

whole, if willing to settle for lawns

cratered as flat, green moons.

Larry D. Thomas, a previous contributor to the Delta Poetry Review, is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and served as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate. His poetry and prose have appeared in a number of national journals, including the Arkansas Review, Texas Review, Concho River Review, Louisiana Literature, Deep South Magazine, Valley Voices: A Literary Review, and Red Dirt Forum. Of Southern heritage, he now resides in the Chihuahuan Desert of southwestern New Mexico approximately one hundred miles from the Bootheel.