Lee Evans Verse-Virtual 2017 April

April 2017

I live with my wife in Bath, Maine and work for the local YMCA. My activities consist of such things as contemplative walking in the out-of-doors, and teaching myself, with great difficulty, the Pali language. My work has been published in "The Christendom Review", "Mused: The Bella Online Literary Review", "The Poetry Porch" and other places. I have self-published several books of poetry, which are available on Lulu.com.

To My Grandfather, A. H. Wilson

The Farmer is a lover of the Land;
No Farmer he who labors but for gain.
When all the cows are milked, and broken grain
Thrown to the chickens, and the peaches canned,
The fences mended, and the nude sheep stand
Relieved of their wool coats at chilly dawn,
His fancy is to plant a lily pond—
For more than just a Farmer is a Man.
He builds a tiny cabin at that place,
And sets beside it on the sandstone ledge
A painted laborer of fired clay,
Whose shadow will not scare goldfish away.
That all this work is good, he sits to judge
Upon his porch swing, at the close of day.

Two Yesterdays

My grandma’s Mason jars are now antique,
In which she canned the produce of her farm—
The peaches, beets, tomatoes; but their charm
As toys for idle children in the weeks
Of school-less summer, that fine meek
And Christian woman could not soon suspect:
No Great Depression weighed upon our necks,
Like yokes of oxen dragging plows that creak.
Instead our days were ignorant of care;
Our evenings passed like fireflies in flight,
Which we would trap inside the sturdy jars
With grass and twigs, the lid just cracked for air;
And gaze upon their struggles in the night—
Their abdomens of mystic, yellow light.

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