Six Poems by John Drudge

 

Autumn in the Village

 

I saw you

Walk across

Washington Square

You pretended

Not to see me

As you rushed

Into the poetry

Of the park

Where I lost you

In the reds and yellows

Of the city

Breathing

Into the Stream

 

Samplers of existence

Left idle

In a magnetite tide

Stranded

On an impenetrable

Sargasso Sea

Shipwrecks

And ancestry

Buried in the sand

With one lone call

Left to wander

Into the mysteries

Of a shallow

Blue stream

Pearl

 

A great absence

In childhood

Inventing worlds

To fill space

Scratching the surface

Of breaking desire

The inevitable obsession

Of the oyster

With the pearl

A singular beauty

To be nurtured

In the bosom

Of reassurance

A grain of sand

At the core

Something Like Sorrow

 

Deregulated

In the palace of wisdom

A pressure against

The outer skull

We were once

In tune with nature

We were once in tune

With change

Now left to wander

Through deserts

Of hunger

A sole note on the wind

Through a window

Sounding something like

Sorrow

 

The Poet

 

The ugliness

Is always there

On the street level

Where the truth lives

Hymns for the lonely

In a detached

And disenfranchised world

No message

No morality

Just living

In the impact

Of immediacy

And the photography

Of words

The Wavering Sun

 

The cynicism

Helps me survive

Like a cocoon

For the winter

At least that’s what he

Told himself

A beat like a tin can

On the wind

A visual

Drifting away on dreams

A shot in the dark

One quick trigger

After another

A shot of love

Or something

Lost in the wavering

Sun

 

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.