2020 / POETRY / AUTHOR

JOHN GREY

THE QUESTION OF MY SURVIVAL
…

The cube is no wilderness
and the computer screen
can conjure up the image
of a Minnesota forest at dawn

but doesn’t know it from
a sale at Walmart,
so it’s up to me to remember
deer nibbling, fox trotting,
bobcat slinking silently
between the grass and light.

This office is the engine
so they tell me, though
I prefer the brain with its heart
somewhere devouring the
dank water fruits with moose,
or crawling from a groundhog’s hole
or high in an old oak
jack-hammering woodpecker holes.

A guy thinks he’s making a living
but the real living is elsewhere.
I see a black bear, head bent,
sipping at the stream,
follow a wolverine track,
watch fishers cavort in splashy shallows.
One paycheck comes.
It’s never enough.
Another soars with the hawk,
romps with the swallows.
I lie on my back
on the soft, giving, earth... pay-dirt

…

JOHN GREY is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Hawaii Pacific Review, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty with work upcoming in Blueline, Willard and Maple and Red Coyote.

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POETS IN MORSE CODE EXPLORES THE ROLE OF INTERPRETATION IN STORYTELLING. BY INCORPORATING MORSE CODE, ONE OF THE MOST WIDELY USED AND RECOGNIZED CIPHERS IN EXISTENCE, SAITERUX JUXTAPOSES LINES OF POETRY AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHS AND TECHNICAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF FLORA & FAUNA FROM THE EARLY DAYS OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION. THROUGH THE TEXT AND IMAGE PAIRINGS, THE ILLUSTRATIONS LEAN INTO THE ABSTRACT ELEMENTS OF A STORY, RECOGNIZING THAT STORYTELLING DEPENDS ON THE WRITTEN WORD AS WELL AS THE IMAGINATION, EXPERIENCES, AND KNOWLEDGE EACH READER BRINGS TO THE OCCASION. MORE FROM SAITERUX