One Poem by John Drudge

 

A Long Thin Spring

 

She was something

Forbidden and forgotten

Like a buried treasure

On a distant shore

Like Seurat’s three models

Looking naked and downcast

Gloomy

In the afternoon sun

Puzzling everyone

Posing and pretending

With unhappiness

Oozing from every pore

Revealing secrets from the darkness

Mistreatment and misadventure

On the high seas

With pirate blood running cold

Like the sound of shots

Across the bow

When the boat runs too close

To the shore

On those nights we tried to forget

At the end of the past

And the quick seconds

Of sudden choice

In the science of hue

And the strange tricks of eyes

Lost in sunlight

How one colour

Sitting next to another

Makes something else

On the wheel

And how we spin into each other

Along a thin string through history

From a single point

In a new kind of time

Shrouded in mystery

Geometric shapes

And black drawings in old books

One more link in the chain

That brings me back

To the slowness of Paris

And the way she moved

With ease

Through every second of every day

And how it was in each of us

In every picnic on the grass

And every walk

Along the riverbank

With something deeper

Bathing in beauty

Under the speckled frozen movement

Of hardened minutes

Against the brittle glass

Between the things we wanted

And the things we needed

Shaking indolence from the trees

As spring set in

John Drudge is a social worker working in the field of disability management and holds degrees in social work, rehabilitation services, and psychology. He is the author of four books of poetry: “March” (2019), “The Seasons of Us” (2019), New Days (2020), and Fragments (2021). His work has appeared widely in numerous literary journals, magazines, and anthologies internationally. John is also a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and lives in Caledon Ontario, Canada with his wife and two children.