Issue 12
Rest
John Ward
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Locust
I leave the library after dark. Carnage is everywhere, too thick to
walk
without trampling. I shuffle, push bodies away with my feet. They are
round
smooth fingers, pink in the streetlight. They should be hanging to
dry their
wrinkled wings, but there are too many. Most will be dead by morning.
How
did I lift a spade of earth without finding one? Why didn't I hear
their
vast army clawing up from the depths? Were they chanting in a
frequency too
high for my ears, spewing pheromones I couldn't sense? All arise on
one
night, to mate in a single summer and go back under for another
seventeen
years, to have their paths blocked by concrete, to hit that stone
sarcophagus just as they are ready to ascend to the embrace of trees
and
grass. What is the point, to erupt into the air and become just one
more
writhing carcass in a sea of metamorphosis? What patience! What
futility!
Seventeen years of solitary grubbing in the dirt, then the long dig
upward
into a world filled with so many of your kind it smothers you. I
lumber
home, a weary walk to my bed, another day of classes tomorrow.
~John Ward
John A. Ward was born on Staten Island, attended Wagner College in
the early '60s, and sold his first poem to Leatherneck
Magazine for $10. Email.
© 2003 by John Ward. All Rights Reserved.
© Copyright 2003 by Cayuse Press. All Rights Reserved.