Watering Hole Pastoral
POETRY
by Matthew Johnson
There were no voices or sounds,
Except for the songs of crickets, sprouting out of ornamental grasses,
In harmony and unison with the songs of the birds, tied to their hidden branches.
A lone figure, one of those dark-skinned girls
Which Langston and Jean Toomer wrote poems about,
But who didn’t have to watch their lover get hanged, or attack them,
Traces her fingers in the water, as if writing out the alphabet,
Resting from her laps to the mossy rock in the middle of the creek, and back,
After taking flight from the church picnic, with its stuffy congregation.
The blistering sun decides to withdraw the haze of humidity,
And the moist and hot air recedes, to the places where the winds go,
And a soft and subtle warmth embraces and dries her off,
As she reaches for her Sunday best,
Hung upon a low-lying branch, like her mother’s clothing line.
Matthew Johnson’s poetry has appeared in Maudlin House, The Roanoke Review, Maryland Literary Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and other literary journals and magazines. His debut collection, Shadow Folks and Soul Songs, was published by Kelsay Books in 2019. Far from New York State, his second collection of poetry, is scheduled for release in Fall 2022 by New York Quarterly Press. Johnson has an MA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is a former sports journalist whose work has appeared in USA Today College, The Daily Star in Oneonta, New York, and elsewhere. Currently, he is the managing editor of Portrait of New England and the poetry editor of The Twin Bill, a literary baseball journal.
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