Two Poems
by Kenneth Clark
Southern Farm Song
Love bugs signal with
their lives that summer
comes to pull cotton
from red clay, dry
dirt. Storm shadows
tempt the green shoots
with long, wet fingers --
come here, come
and pull the white up
on Cottonwood Highway
where we sheltered on
a dirt road, parked under
an oak tree and hid
behind a berry thicket
until the rains stopped.
You smoked cigarettes
& I pulled your panties
off, fit myself against
you like gulf breezes
between the blossoms,
fence posts in the earth.
At the Spillway
Μολων Λαβε -- Come take them
At the spillway the red
winged blackbird crouches down
between sunflower and milo food
four pounds per quarter acre, waits
with wings ready for exaltation,
for its siege of sisters
and brothers to dot
out the sunlight
and make shadow in
the cloudless skies. Here
the brash cast of egrets ankle up
in water from two Septembers ago, their
mute tone ignored by the redwings in
flight, covering black tip to wingtip
above brim and catfish ponds,
over what was Montz and
not Thermopylae, the fish
thankless under
the shade.
Kenneth Clark grew up in Louisiana outside of New Orleans, but not before criss-crossing the States with his parents at the whim of the U.S. Navy. Those experiences drove him to choose the Air Force before college. He has lived in southeast Asia, and most of the southeastern U.S. He now lives in ___ , where he writes poesy and micro-fiction. He does not write the novel started a decade ago.