A Poem by Carol Alexander

The Walk

The walkers on this road travel without light:

darkness cuts us down to size, vagrants

fording rural stiles, skirting the black herds,

confusing bodies porcine, bovine, hominal.

Our city ways were lit with sodium lights

when we assuredly commandeered night--

passage from the rose spray over docks,

the penetration of stars, solace of crowds

staring wall-eyed at the stumbling human tide.

This binding kerchief tightened on the brow

concentrates the breath, blinds the eyes,

trips the foot on shadowed roots along the berm.

The country contracts like cold flesh, buckling

like springtime roads quaking in winter’s wake.

Glib talkers in our way, we go on saying nothing

on this blasted odyssey: children of the father

masked, respiring for the last few hours until

his wanderers arrive and he can quietly expire.

We will curse that walk with everything we have

the sleeping country mindless of itself

of desperate acts that happen every day

of cold fields razed for the blue wards

where lights left burning wink for new breath

for old breath hushed and frail skin raggedly torn

for the strut of shift change just before dawn.

Carol Alexander is a writer and editor in the field of educational publishing. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Avocet, Chiron Review, Mobius, Numinous, The New Verse News, Red River Review, and OVS. New work is scheduled to appear in Canary, Eunoia Review, Sugar Mule, Poetrybay, and the Mad Hatter's Review. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Broken Circles, Joy Interrupted, The Storm is Coming, and Surrounded: Living with Islands.