~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Sharlyn Page

Wild Canna Lilies

They loved the red clay land

and the dark loam in fertile valleys.

Grandfather raised cabbage,

cows, and tall orange Canna lilies.

Blackberries ripened in the sun

that shone on the spoils of defeat,

they learned to live with shell shock

and prophecy come to pass under their feet.

The pasture fence opens at the rusty gate,

where whistling ballads of hanged men,

young girls call home the cows,

leading them down the narrow glen.

This was the slow greening of a burned past

where children know Uncle Lester's saga

who at age eighteen walked barefoot home

after the battle of Chicamauga.

Years later the families of the dead

were issued plaques,

and posed for photographs, the small square

of wood and metal on their laps.

These are long since thrown away,

as photographs of those once loved

fade from the black and white of sacrifice

to wavering shades of gray.

Time Bottled

 At the outer edge of the known star path

before the descent into anti-matter canyon,

there is the converted fruit stand selling

time in bottles. 

Some of the bottles are ancient,

roman hand blown. Forest green ware

from the dark ages goes for high value

even if only filled with one hour each. 

There is something for everyone,

the fortnight is especially popular and they

run low in this selection every Thursday,

because of the sale on Wednesday evening. 

But the clear glass Pyrex with a real cork seal

is over-priced even when it contains five years.

This time bottle stand doesn't deal in

more than two decades, for that you have to go

up the road to the shack of rattlesnake hide,

but he is usually out, so good luck with that.

Good luck is being researched too,

they want  to bottle it,

but the time sellers scoff, since

buying time covers that already.

A lot of mothers buy a few minutes,

they go cheap, and someone had the novel idea

of glitter, usually silver-colored, bursting out

when the bottle was opened.

No one knows what un-heralded genius

thought that one up,

probably some teenage girl,

too bad she didn't get credit.

But then credit is not everything,

and to be blazingly obvious, time is.

Hungry Love

Of course change is fundamental

to chameleon life.  Brown for a moment,

he knows how to live in the moment,

brown greening slowly, a better instant,

landing on a leaf. 

Leaves do something to him,

he would have said

it was hungry love in every cell.

Cold had come to Florida.

We had a heated floor in the bath

and the chameleon was there,

brown as ever and in a hurry.

Fear in his spine, he raced across

alarming heated ground, then stopped.

Revelation came to lizard.

He stilled, as if to think:

wait, this is summer under foot.

what he meant was, this was

heaven, warm surprise.

The chameleon has his inkling,

ground creepers learn fast

that down is everything they ever

wanted to call home,

gravity's flee from leaf, what always awaits.

Cold wind in season

sends us all to an inside place;

the lizard followed chance,

some hidden order, to uncanny warmth,

We who lament an earth not enough,

full of our handmade discontent,

we too will stand greening with

some instant's summer rising.

All he loved and knew

was not all there could be.

Thereafter, lizard grew many colored

at will, but never was the same.

Sharlyn Page lives in Florida. Authoring over 600 works, she studied philosophy, language, and poetry at the University of Florida, the University of Freiburg, the University of Colorado, and Jungian psychology at the Naropa Institute. She is published in the FSPA Poetry Contest winners’ edition of Cadence. Her first Poetry Chapbook, Heliotrope, A Woman’s Turning, is available on Amazon. Email: sharlynpage@gmail.com