~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Larry D. Thomas

Sweet Time

In late autumn, near sundown,

they watch one another

as if stalled in a game

of distant dominoes,

the old sharecropper

rocking on the porch of his shack

and the lone crow roosting in the old

Arkansas pine clinging to the far bank

of the river.  Each takes his sweet time,

staring down the other,

though both know only too well

who’ll play the winning domino.

Oleander

The salt-ladened wind from the Gulf's

for you but a perfect preservative,

the evergreen scoundrel you are

handling with equal adroitness

the seasons' alternating scourges

of fire and ice.  Your poison leaves

tough as rough, dark green leather,

are arranged around your branches

like the spokes of a chariot wheel.

Reaching heights of sixteen to eighteen feet,

you make an ideal windbreak,

turning the June, Louisiana sun

into clusters of fragrant flowers,

into bulwarks of billowy wine

quenching for a while our savage thirst.

A member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, Larry D. Thomas has published twenty-three print books of poems including In a Field of Cotton: Mississippi River Delta Poems. His recent poetry publications include the Arkansas Review, Valley Voices, and Green Hills Literary Lantern. Email: buffalonm@comcast.net