August 2017
William Greenway
whgreenway@ysu.edu
whgreenway@ysu.edu
Some wag somewhere said that being a poet is all well and good, but what do you do with the other 23½ hours in the day? Whitman replies that you loaf and invite your soul. (Or you can lead poetry writing workshops, if you can get ‘em.)
Floridays
Like the best dreams
it will never come true
in this life, to live
where I was happiest,
strip of land between river
and sea, fishing the bridges
to the mangroved mainland,
or the pier stilted out over green surf,
only one-week-a-year respite
from red-dirt dusty Georgia.
All condos and malls now.
So I summer on the other coast,
trolling the clearer waters of the Gulf,
osprey and ibis, gator
and gopher tortoise,
armadillo on the millionaires’ island
I can only visit.
I’ll die up here in the cold, gray north,
hoping the light I move toward
and into is the light I saw then
glancing off of sun-bleached shells
and salt-white sand.
© 2017 William Greenway
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