Sunday, January 24, 2016

Ralph Monday- Two Poems


      Ralph Monday is Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 50 journals. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014. A book Empty Houses and American Renditions was published May 2015 by Aldrich Press. A Kindle chapbook Narcissus the Sorcerer was published June 2015 by Odin Hill Press.
      Website: Ralph Monday

The Old Days

I remember as a child in the old days
when the winters were white and cold
and dark, there in the cellar my grandparents
kept the year’s bounty so that we might
eat in the long, unfruitful months:
potatoes and butternut squash, onions with
the roots still attached, dirt clinging like
ants on a drop of honey, tubers and turnips
and yellow shelled baskets of corn.
All waited patiently in the shadows for my
grandmother to gather and turn into a table
feast.
Now, those days are gone. The trips to the local
Kroger or Wal-Mart a poor substitute for the
love found in that cellar.


Full Wolf Moon

In this month the bone polished
orb brings lamenting hunger
cries from the wolves in the
forest say the old Native folk
that have lived in the blood of the
land for millennia.
Though detached from the
land that hunger mirrors the
appetite of man:
hunger for salvation,
for material, perishing goods,
for love,
for sex,
for blindness to mute the
inevitable throb in the
gut taking all toward
the wolf’s cry,
without thought,
without understanding,
forgetting that the moon has
always been there to
guide the way.



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