Three Poems by Stephen Leonard: Flyway, Driving a Stick, Awful

Three Poems
by Stephen Leonard

Flyway

Apples stayed in empty linden arms
The day you walked out
Of the garden
I designed.
Harvest moons bypassed this town,
Never slowing down
To consider
Changes of heart.
Rain expressed only in extremes
As though I gave up
On the bloom
Of hope.
God bless the cool blanketed nights
Where I curled up
In the idea
Of salvation.
Then, waking to the morning birds
Singing sweet songs of migration,
I fell out of bed laughing
Remembering love always finds its way home.

Driving a Stick

I sit, idling, in the driveway
Warming up to the idea
That I am made for journeys.
No longer a new model,
Right off the lot,
I need faith more
Than pampering;
Dinged up and with scratches,
Sometimes misfiring
And wheezing into acceleration,
Something that seems so familiar
And so reliable
Can be counted on in the clutch:
Shifting gears in homage to the physics,
Model? Make?
Irrelevant after this many miles.
You pay for what you get;
I only need to get from here to there
(and back.)
Otherwise, I’m back to driving
With my thumb stuck out in the wind.

Awful

The world is an awful lesson
In the science of see-saws
And the art of veils.
I know this because my mother
Never stopped singing its praises
And my father never stopped
Meditating in the shadows.
Impressed somewhere in between,
I ran naked through life in someone else’s clothes
Until I fell for the one who didn’t even need me.

Stephen Leonard is a teacher and macroanalyst with the unique experience of having split the two halves of his life in Massachusetts and Louisiana. Previously published in Down East and SNReview, work on his novel, The Funerals, remains. He still believes Danny, the Champion of the World should be required reading for all parents.

Copyright 2014, © Stephen Leonard. This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.