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
Robert Funderburk was born by coal oil lamplight in a tin-roofed farmhouse outside Liberty, Mississippi. He moved to Baton Rouge, graduated from LSU, served as SSgt USAFR (1965-1971) and now is a retired parole officer spending his time writing and enjoying a country home on fifty acres of wilderness with his wife, Barbara, in Olive Branch, Louisiana. Robert has had seventeen novels published, along with eighty-five poems and five short stories in various literary journals.
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