At the Gulf's Edge

The air reeks

of the black, roiling Gulf

crashing against the colossal

granite blocks of the jetty.

A dank chill

snuffs the ashen candles

of her bruised, fractured bones.

She leans into the wind

buffeting her wracked body,

her bloody clothes flapping

like tattered flags.

A pang of fear

jolts her torpor

leaden as the darkness

of a nearby boarded-up church

slated for demolition.

In the palpable silence

of the sanctuary, moonglow

trickles through stained glass

to glint the cradled

chalice of the night.

On a Sunday Morning

a few miles outside New Orleans,

like weary hands pressed in prayer,

a wooden spire rises through a grove

of ancient oaks where Spanish moss

hangs like tufts of live death,

mottling plots for graves,

and a wooden church

resonates with the strains of a black choir

creeping through the shadows

like tuberous, starchy stems of kudzu,

laden with the scent of honeysuckle,

hard on the heels of amazing grace.

Larry D. Thomas, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, was privileged to serve as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate. He has published several award-winning and critically acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently Boiling It Down: The Electronic Poetry Chapbooks of Larry D. Thomas and In a Field of Cotton: Mississippi River Delta Poems, both of which were published by Blue Horse Press in 2019. A critical essay regarding Thomas's Delta poetry titled, "Despair and Hope through Delta Labor in the Poetry of Larry D. Thomas," by J. Todd Hawkins, appeared in the Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies, Volume 50, Issue 1.