The August Selected Poet is Ronald Terry
Please feel free to email Ronald at: ronnie@nelrod.com
GATEWAY
Life seeps away,
replaced by spiders
along the eye edge,
their black legs clicking
in and out of view.
The descendants of my mother
gather in a purple room,
drinking from cracked and leaking cups.
Some are born; others wait.
They may wait forever.
I bow before the dusty altar.
Headless winged angels on either side
hold their arms open to welcome
new arrivals through the cathedral door.
Their beauty still lives in someone’s memory.
JOURNEY’S END
Dissolution of structure into vapor,
the fate of the body, mandated
by Wyrds entranced before the cauldron.
Clothed in clouds streaming from its lips,
their skulls peer down without sound.
Priests gather before the broken wall.
Each slices off his own head,
sets it on the wall,
and returns to darkness.
The moon gazes through gauzy haze
as a bride or mourner through a veil.
Gentle snow that melts on the tongue
is born again as ice.
Houses with empty wind eyes
are the world that awaits.
A traveler arrives at the threshold of light.
No one welcomes him.
The mind sinks into its own thought,
moving through tunnels that never open.
Our bones slide away.
Our empty clothes follow the wind
into distance and mist.
The habits of gods
are hard to remember
for a man that just walks.
WEDDING
The heat seeks the night
and veils the sun as a gift,
like a woman dressed for marriage or death.
The paling day neither weeps nor smiles
as it hears the man and bride
singing dark fate as payment for love.
Its ashes sink into the sea
to dwell with the bones of fish.
Behind, the Tower tarot card burns.
Headless corpses become black
under this concealed sun.
But we do not die today,
only our hands and our heads.
We move on again, old and knowing,
over the earth.
Our spirit’s beauty can be seen
in dreams of the unseen blue kingdom.
RESURRECTION
Schedule savages of the mind,
distinct light to the unknown.
My head is too vulnerable.
I’ll make it into a vase.
One side will be my eyes, nose, and lips,
in red and blue glaze.
The other side will be a mystery—
perhaps you can see it following the curve of the earth.
Leaves melt, one into the other.
The streets flow red into all the houses.
The candle light blows but does not die.
The silence beats like wings against a window.
Don't look out; it's just yourself from long ago,
now dead and buried, trying to get in.
Raised in Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi, Ronald Terry earned an M.A. in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, where he wrote his Master's Thesis on the poetry of Ted Hughes (“Ted Hughes and the Power of Darkness”). Ronald started his career as a Secondary School and Community College teacher but for the past 28 years has worked as a Technical Writer in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas. His poems have appeared in print and online publications such as Night Cry, Space and Time, Amanita Brandy, Anteroom, Dead Snakes, Poetrybay, Hungur, among others. In recent years, just for fun, he has experimented with writing free verse and prose poems in the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) language, totally ignoring traditional Old English metrical forms. An ardent Celtic music fan, he can be seen every year haunting all the Irish/Scottish heritage festivals in North Texas.