~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Larry D. Thomas

Giraffes

(Audubon Zoo, New Orleans)

When they drink, they spread their legs

like the linemen of a football team

readying for a snap. High above the zoo grounds,

where their great heads hover in the heavens,

rapt atop the eighteen-feet high cranes of their bulk,

they chew their cud, working their jaws like camels,

sweep their long, gorgeous eyelashes,

and they stare, their dark, bulbous eyes

riveted to something well beyond

the distant, sienna haze of the horizon.

In the Little Towns

of rural Tennessee, the handful of women

of child-bearing years still lingering,

raise their kids to the age of eighteen

and see them off to Nashville or Memphis.

Even the traffic lights are down to the one

at the intersection near the square,

flashing caution in all four directions.

Two older men, still young enough to work,

peddle junk, more out of habit than necessity.

The others either shuffle to the square

for games of dominoes, or watch the landscape

from the Home of the Golden Sunset windows.

The only old folk living alone are the widows

watering their half-dead yards at sundown,

balanced precariously on brown, cotton-

stockinged legs stiff as the desiccated stalks

of Zinnias which, having bloomed,

inch toward the earth and the certainty

of their dying on their own timetable,

in accordance with the dignity

of their proudly unassisted terms.

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. Email: buffalonm@comcast.net