GOODBYE AND HELLO

This is a town
where the train doesn’t stop.
Arrival and departure
are one and the same thing.

But there is more to the people
in this place than a smear
in the window of a passing locomotive.
Let no one rush through and call it nothing.

For years we’ve worked and slept
inside this soft-edged blur,
the scattering of houses,
the two-block Main Street.

Yet the train barrels through
at fifty miles an hour
worth of indifference.
It cares only for the bodies on board,

never the ones who stay put,
who plant themselves,
who insist on mattering.
We apologize for not being scenery.

We are used to not being seen.

*

THE FISHERMEN’S WIVES

Wives stood on these blunt headlands
the way women stand at stoves, at cribs.
But they cooked no meals here.
They tended to no babies.
Their eyes scoured the fog
for the outline of a boat returning.

They suffered the gray hours,
faces pressed to air
as if it were a windowpane,
that looked out on the unknown.

But in a tidy downtown park,
a fisherman stands in marble,
thirty feet tall, net at his feet,
a monument to the ones
the sea swallowed whole.

No stone remembers the ones on shore,
those who died by living,
of intermingled dread and hope,
of the slow rot
of days and nights alone.
There is no plaque
for the labor of waiting.

But maybe they are their own memorial –
steadfast on their bluffs,
the salt wind blustering hair,
formed of the steadfast ache of love
that stared deep into the pit of nothingness,
and would not turn away.

*

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, Trampoline and Flights. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Levitate, White Wall Review and Willow Review.