After Reading Charles Wright
Great wind keeps carrying us
where we don’t want, where we don’t know.
– Charles Wright, from “Black and Blue”
A final hour of sunlight. Early November
on the backs of crickets, the garden bare
but for the peppers that still bloom, somehow—
ajicitos and serranos, a thick-eared poblano.
Poblano: del pueblo. Of the village, the people.
Of the people, by the people, for the people:
words plucked from war’s dark wind—
gold-veined, brittle and blotched
as the poplar leaf that flits from my hand.
Where will I come to rest? Where will we?
Of what use our years?
A cloudless, azure sky. Wood smoke
in the air. Long shadows, tongues of night.
Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. His work appears in Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Chautauqua and many other journals and publications. He is currently working on a debut poetry collection.
Header photo by Galyna Andrushko, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Laura Winter by Brad Winter.
