3 Poems by Allison Grayhurst; photo by Bea Garth

By beagarth on September 7, 2017 • ( 0 )

"Rooster Rock Beach: Walking Back," photo by Bea Garth, copyright 2017

Five Days

Five days without belief,
lost like a pebble tossed into
a deep stream.
My prayers have turned grey, culled by
despair – there but not really there.
Every ghost has come in, crowding
my upper floors. In the wastebins, in the filing cabinets,
my hands have been scraped
and there they fell – two dead weights,
lacking the strength to be lifted.
Like something left out
of the fridge for too long, my taste has
been tainted. God is a soft echo in the open air.
I hear words, but words I cannot formulate
or beckon to come near.
Five sunsets in black and white.
Five days to give in and die or to hold tight
to the thread string, the little string, the are-you-there?-string,
to hold on and commit to never return here
for all my days remaining.

Because of You

It was the music I always craved,
but dreams were not marked down,
and love was dark as drawn curtains.
But because of you I lived. Because of you
I drank the venom and cure at once.
Because your hand pressed against my
forehead, I learned the strength of my voice.
I learned to dive into the lava-pit of grief and rise
changed, resolved.
Because of your gifts in the summer months,
we made it through with only pennies in our jar
and vague promises in all closed drawers.
Because you loved us under the withered tree,
we found the nectar of our song.
Because you reached when we fell,
all the things we name as good
we now know abide in you. Faith
will warm the broken mother while cradling the weight
of her child.

Keep On Moving

It is not over
though the wood is wedded to the ground.
It is not over when we rise
to find a flood around our house
and see the empty schoolbus.
There are miracles that fill the barren fields,
and in the slaughteryard
somehow God must give love.
Sex has lost its purity and starlight has
slipped far below the waves.
But still the goal is to be consciously free,
to be the truth we were given.
The goal is to let other people’s thoughts die to our own,
to befriend the ever tightening noose of time.
It is hard to travel free of ghosts,
integrated as the sky.
It is hard as the stones we pocket and the secrets
we carry into our sleep, holding
our entrance into the coming day.

———————

Bio: Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Three times nominated for Sundress Publications “Best of the Net” 2015, she has over 1100 poems published in over 430 international journals. She has sixteen published books of poetry, seven collections and nine chapbooks. She lives in Toronto with her family. She is a vegan. She also sculpts, working with clay; www.allisongrayhurst.com

Some of the places her work has appeared in include Parabola (Alone & Together print issue summer 2012); Elephant Journal; Literary Orphans; Blue Fifth Review; The American Aesthetic; The Brooklyn Voice; Agave Magazine; JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, Drunk Monkeys; Now Then Manchester; South Florida Arts Journal; Gris-Gris; The Muse – An International Journal of Poetry, Storm Cellar, morphrog (sister publication of Frogmore Papers); New Binary Press Anthology; etc.

Bio: Bea Garth is editor for Eos the Creative Context, as well as a feminist artist and poet. She feels its important for humanity to create a new, more nurturing paradigm in contradiction to the ecological ravages brought on by uncontrolled capitalism. Bea is also the new webmaster for the Oregon Women’s Caucus for Art (http://oregonwca.org). To find out more about her personal art and poetry, see her site at: https://bgarthart.com