A TRIP TO YOUR OLD HOME TOWN AFTER MANY YEARS by John Grey

A TRIP TO YOUR OLD HOME TOWN AFTER MANY YEARS

Crescent moon,

ironic smile for a modest Main Street,

pitter-patter of lights

in house after house,

none of them looking your way,

thump of wheels on bridge,

the only heartbeat extant.

Let down by memory,

too much razed or flattened,

or surrendered up to grass and weeds,

a sad comedy, a disenchantment,

to every number on every street,

and wind dirge

from the north,

stained statues in the park

speaking for the dumb,

brown water current

keeping mum over past drownings,

so few places,

so much time has changed them,

like the towering oaks

whose leaves exchange their colors

for the death below.

Strange lure to the unfamiliar

in the once familiar,

ghostly library mammoth,

phantom school house on the hill,

morose trailers fixed like planets

around the sun

of the shared bathrooms.

House you were born into

no longer there -

you take its advice

and leave.


John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Sin Fronteras, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty with work upcoming in Plainsongs, Willard and Maple and Connecticut River Review.