“Are the living happier than
the dead?” children wonder
when they turn over a scarlet
brick and find a lost Atlantis.
There the worms are dragons
who tell explorers soon they’ll
die in a single second on some
certain day so the scene shifts
to summer, a doctor’s packed
waiting room. The shadow is
too deep, night itself emerges
from darkening leaves whose
emerald hides darkness behind
a secret door. A brightest toy
ages to the amber of October,
before the parted lips can sing
a ghostly someone recalls and
hums the old tune. My young
father’s brown hair was white
with dust from the drywall’s
spackled nail heads he sanded
and my young mother smiled
then said, “At 50 you’re going
to be so handsome!” I heard it
through glass, gazing at newest
room of the new house already
ancient, felt a wave of cresting
evening I couldn’t stop or slow,
July ditch water racing down
furrows to a shadeless winter.
Above me two mourning doves
in a cherry tree sang words they
had by heart when shells broke
and spines grew to feathers for
wings though in tall air blue as
heaven there was nowhere to fly.
Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nominations.
Euphony Journal 