Two Poems

An Inconvenient Truth Realized

 

In the vegetable bin, something fetid, green gone brown:

the truth of life—decay—a stench right under my nose.

July heat turning fruit to jerky in one afternoon.

That’s me—a jerky, a leather, a decay arrested.

Dylan’s words in “Forever Young”: impossible dream,

a ladder stretching, yearning for yellow torch of sun.

By next year I might be Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense

or those souls trapped in Saunders’ Lincoln at the Bardo,

the ones already past decay but not yet released,

like Cher, retired but still not gone, or Dolly Parton.

 

No fancy footwork will forestall demise or keep me

as fresh as I wish I were, vibrant and vigorous,

not even if I soak my feet and Oil of Olay

my face or call on the blessings of the scalpel.

Nothing we can do to cancel our free tickets

to Hamlet’s undiscovered country or keep us

from becoming our inner wilted celery,

a limp and stinking vestige of ourselves.

 

Great Blue Heron as Metaphor for Love

 

This great blue heron does not look so great.

It looks beaten, defeated, exhausted,

and dirty. It is hunkered—yes, hunkered—

mid-trail in a small, mostly dry wetlands

beside the highway—disheveled, squat,

its long legs folded beneath it, hidden,

its long neck pulled back, its heavy beak lined

and dry, its wings wrapped around its body.

No majesty here. No soaring. As we

approach, it does not move. It does not turn

its head or blink its yellow eye or seem

to notice us. It simply sits, abides,

a fact of life as solid and unmoved

as the dirt of the trail we walk today.

 

Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (he hopes) to enjoy. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and elsewhere.