Political Harvest

Toward the east
Through back porch screen
Clouds are forming their ranks
Against the sun

A crow’s distant cawing
Gives voice to solitude
Worn like a thorny cloak
And mocks that final promise

Hope and lifeline once
Now become more lethal
Than foreign shrapnel

Pines murmured all night
In their high, strange tongue
I listened, no longer trying
To accept or understand
As dust deepens around me

Back to the kitchen I glide
Where blue flame sputters
On the cast-off stove
And brown paper bags
Are bloated
From their diet of bottles
Like the stomachs of children
Brought up on war

[Previously published at The Dead Mule, School of Southern Literature]

Robert Funderburk was born by coal oil lamplight in a farmhouse near Liberty, MS; LSU graduate (1965); SSgt USAFR (1965-1971); retired parole officer living with his wife, Barbara, on fifty acres of wilderness in Olive Branch, LA. He is the author of seventeen novels, one national bestseller, 20 poems in literary journals, and one short story.