Frogs croaking at midnight
a twin heartbeat
like moss engraving stones entwining with spongy hearts that bleed
the question now is who will carry the porridge?
who will listen to Sumter describe the events that followed his desasterous night of frogs croaking, camping in the woods?
who listenes to him, the dusky hours grow long
the day widens into a smile
furrows into a frown
the clown
Sumter,
banned from the camping ground just as the air was warm
in the chill,
he knows the only comfort can come from
humming a silent tune
a tune which he will pick himself
in doing so he sounds just like the twin heartbeats of the two croaking frogs
he must find his little world
he must find it
or the summer will drag him through an endless pit
and he will see himself as a small boy
groping for the sidewalk and the sun
not knowing that the only eventual destination was death and lead,
the spongy twin bleeding hearts his own.
he feels the ground
the moist air lightens his eye
upwards is an unforgiving sky
tinged with something else he cant describe,
but we shall call it a vague
and unmistakable hope.
he clings to the forrest ground, the moss,
like a child refusing to leave behind his blanket.
the porridge is on a stove growing cold
it’s breakfast fire
warming time
but poor Sumter on the forest ground
the enemy of which he made last night
sleeping on a bed of firs and pine cones.
the last of his breath escapes from his nostrils,
tendrils of air and smoke in equal measure
percolate the air
but he is not there with his friends to see the fire or to hear the stories
because he has told them his story
and that was the one story
they could not hear
so instead they decided to shut him off
and he, with his breath
and they, with the fires, keep burning aloft in their own separate ways,
he pains to think of them, the little children he has left on the
other side of the mountain.
Copyright 2014 Golden Star Poetry
Golden Star Poetry 