~ DELTA POETRY REVIEW ~

Doctrine Of Signatures

I carry the fragment
Of a broken heart
To the outskirts of
The Orleans swamp.
 
There I'm blindfolded.
My guides smell of smoke
And salt marshes.
The thistles slash my legs
And Weeping Willow vines
Slap my face.
 
It is a long, stumbling trek.
 
I am unhooded
By a crackling fire
At the river's edge.
 
Two older women,
One black - one white
Carefully take the heart fragments.
One grasps my right hand
The other takes my left.
 
We sway back and forth
While they hum in unison.
The fragments are thrown
In the sparking fire.
 
With the help of the guides,
The women force me into the river.
 
They release me into the current.
 
Within minutes, I wash to a sand bank.
 
I feel the new heart beating.
And have no memories of you.

Sour Mash

The ghost of Robert Johnson
travels from the junction
of US 61 and US 49
with a hellhound at its heels.
Passing the colored hospital
where Bessie Smith lay
bleeding the blues,
it arrives in Clarksdale.
 
A full Southern summer moon
lights the ‘trail’
but this evening
no “kindhearted woman”
can keep the devil away.

The Hitching Post

A somber old kudzu morning with nothing
to recommend its worth beyond
the hazy, wrinkled memory
of some Mississippi corn cob farmer
who seems to vaguely recollect
that as a boy in his desperate twenties
(a time when there wasn’t much else to do
but hitch a wagon and hang on),
it was just such a morning as this one,
so chilly and front porch gray,
that he met a young southern belle
“down to the general store”
and fell in love.
Now with winter just around the corner,
he has time to wonder what ever happened
to that boy and girl.

R. Gerry Fabian is a retired English instructor. He has been publishing poetry since 1972 in various poetry magazines. His novels, Memphis Masquerade, Getting Lucky (The Story) and Seventh Sense, are available at Smashwords and all other ebook publishers. His first book of published poems Parallels is available as an ebook and as a paperback at all major bookstores and on Amazon, as is his second book of published poems, Coming Out of the Atlantic.