Selected Poems

Our Inheritance


Saturdays we come here to walk the fields
or sit in the old swing in the shade 
of the big oak. The silent pond, unsealed 
by a boat’s wake, releases ghosts saved
from the family cemetery, flooded 
for a hundred years. Waves slap the hull, 
like hands marking time. Daylight wanders 
through shadowed rooms and green verandas, 
fields of stone like cotton. Roses bloom in hand
like blood in sand. We have always lived here
for the beauty of what we kill. Hour after hour, 
we float by overhead, the memory of love
abundant as water, sacred as our land. 
We reach down to match our cold hands.

(published in Southern Poetry Review)