~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Benjamin Nash

Gray

Gray chair that was handmade

with a stretched deer hide

seat in my small apartment

that is almost too fragile

for the little cat to sit on,

gray in my short hair,

gray draft horse in the

color picture pulling a

heavy wagon full of coal,

gray morning when I

looked at the old bent oak

tree that I know

children like to climb

on across the street

from the Angela Davis

mural on the pizza place,

gray faces of people in

Ukraine exposed to death

constantly after the

Russian military invaded,

gray day when boys took

off their overalls and

signed their names on

the wall of a small church

next to a cemetery with

graves from the last big

pandemic before they

went to a war in France,

gray rain falling on a

cowboy in the painting

pulling another horse

with two boxes tied on it

and a yellow light in the

house that they just passed by.

Yellow And Orange Light

I saw the pieces of lemon under the dumpster,

the night will be like a crow,

I will hear another gunshot and sirens,

but tomorrow will be like one of those packets

of sunflowers that I buy in the grocery store sometimes,

one or two of them will make it out

of the group from the black dirt and open big,

many of us must be satisfied with less,

it has been enough for me,

happiness depends on what you can’t buy,

I watched a movie about a giant Gila monster

eating people and a show about a police officer in Scotland,

but you never know,

the day could be a little different and be a blue jay in the morning,

I wasn’t even angry when I saw a blue jay

chase a green grasshopper on the

hot asphalt trying to jump to Jupiter

before it ate it one time when I was sitting on the porch,

maybe it will be something special,

yellow and orange light,

I have been reading prairie poems lately,

thinking about what it was like with

the buffalo under yellow and orange suns,

have you ever seen Georgia O'Keeffe's “From the Plains” Texas landscape paintings?

Passing Through

I saw Black-eyed Susan and Indian Blanket flowers on the way into town,

stopped for a Union Pacific yellow locomotive pulling black oil tank cars

with yellow stripes on them through red brick block buildings of an old

downtown where they vote, sit on juries, work, and a few will go to jail,

baseball game on the truck radio and the back locomotive was pushing

like good parents do when their children get into trouble and need help,

I lived here for a few years,

there was a Craftsman house with red canna lilies in the front yard,

a new Mexican restaurant,

I thought about foundations, the jury that I sat on in the big gray art deco

courthouse in Austin where I had to take off my belt before entering it,

Hannah Arendt’s thoughts about them, the men that lifted my apartment

building, and what I learned on Sundays in church about building on sand

as I headed out of town with yellow stripes dividing the long road home,

I remember reading a book about the Dalton gang in the courthouse on

my breaks and learned about what the good people of Coffeyville did,

there was more Black-eyed Susan,

oil pumps and planted corn,

most of us try to do the best that we can,

rusty bridge over muddy river into the hot afternoon and black cows in the shade.

Benjamin Nash has had poems published in Concho River Review, Louisiana Literature, 2River, Blueline, Pembroke Magazine, and other publications. Email: Ben7nash@aol.com