STEVEN CROFT - POEMS

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation.
He has published two chapbooks, Coastal Scenes and Moment and Time, and has recent work
in Willawaw Journal, Sky Island Journal, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut
Memorial Library, Third Wednesday, Red Eft Review, San Pedro River Review, Poets Reading
the News, Gyroscope Review, and other places.

​The Month We Became Quiet

Windblown leaves dance down empty streets
in hermit cities
 
Kids out of school play separately in parks
as sunlight fingers the ripples of lakes
 
Neighbors sit apart to talk while dogwoods
and azaleas bloom fearlessly
 
The languorous day moves toward curfew when
tv news is only worse and no baseball's on the radio
 
Only end of the world sermons where
we have less time to learn to recount
 
One more day's blessings
 ​

​Eternity

​I arrive last: my father behind me, but my grandfather
has asked for me, his wife, and only child, my mother
there.  My grandmother tells me to touch his arm --
cold.  I say, "I'm here."  He looks at me and asks if I see
the colors, lifting his finger at the white wall beyond
the bed, "See them?"  "No," I say, patting his arm. 
I know it's the end:
 
You will never wait for another sunrise of birdsongs,
with your coffee in the chair on the back patio, where
you once said of the birds, "Hear them?"  "Yes," I said. 
I wonder what are the landmarks of this place I can't see,
as you suddenly go there, the machine you're hooked to
flatlining.
 
 

​Ataraxia

​If beliefs were atoms we were immune
from despair -- the mystery of the living world
would reveal all in the rushing of water, the vapors
from a forest floor, even a growing wildfire
blackening the souls of trees, so wild and merciless,
just an excited wonder sweeping us to the great
joining/unjoining, throats become hoarse
singing our pressure waves of joy.

​Dust

​The missile a second's flash
like a flash of sunlight, then the sound
of the war, again, of another day in Syria
 
Blown from the earth, a family's tent floats
over Qah camp, leaves their child who played
down the dirt street walking circles
 
In the world beyond the ripples
of refugees but no help, this orphaned child's
confused trauma folded into a black burka
 
Syria doing all that it can to save itself
 

Umm
​

​So many eager days waiting
for the husband who crossed
into Turkey.  For months, no word,
nothing.  She dreams of home,
 
rinses her hair in the courtyard,
twists this odd life, this waiting
into a tossed out basin, hears
the birds sing as she sits, squeezes
milk from the willing goat before
walking to market, listens to wives'
happy talk, comes home to find
electrical power up today, turns
the tv to an Arab soap opera,
begins making a meal.
 
Instead, absently twists the hijab
around her face like a widow
against winter, cradles her young
daughter who never gets milk now.
 
Outside under a collapsing sky
of low clouds, her son follows a bird's
tracks in the mud along an avenue
of this tent camp in the shadow
of cold hills.
 
If she leaves memory's dream
it will be to rain and sorrow,
and later snow.