~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Larry D. Thomas

Old Metalsmith

Beatty, Nevada

The substances of his art

are the products of the ages,

eased from darkness

deep within the earth

to the light of his fabulous hands.

He contemplates in his copper

the reddish hint of blood,

and traces in his tin

the malleable palms and insteps

of a deity.

Tin is the bride

and lead the groom

indivisible in the wedlock

of his pewter. 

Even his skin

has waxed metallic, so intimate

with decades of sweltering heat

it’s turned to bronze.

Larry D. Thomas, the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, has published twenty-three print collections of poems and several online chapbooks, the most recent of which, Letting the Light Work (poems of Mexico), was published by Buttonhook Press (Chapbook Series) in November 2024.  A previous contributor of poems to the Delta Poetry Review, his poems have also recently appeared in Valley Voices: A Literary Review, Amethyst Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, and elsewhere.