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My poem “Dawn: While You Sleep” was published on The Pedestal Magazine.
Click {When the Stoplight Changes} for a reading of this poem. The poem was posted in November 2011.
Click {Coming Home} for a reading of this poem. The poem was posted in December 2011.
Click {The Hailstorm} for a reading of this poem. The poem was posted in August 2011.
COMING HOME
I’m wearing my dark blue suit,
fresh from the cleaners,
my favorite tie,
its half moons whacked
from the sky, bits
of emerald summer
still clinging to them.
Around me are the people
I’ve known all my life.
Glad to see me, each
spends a moment, tries
to recall thirty years ago,
then moves on.
In the corner of the room,
where they think I can’t hear,
Mother, they say you are dying.
Your sister is combing your hair,
unfurling it like a white flag.
I hold your hands; they are small birds.
And suddenly I realize
that we’ll never say we’re sorry,
never put everything behind us.
There will only be these moments,
your wax blue lips against my cheek,
this fission of what we are, this division
into the silence you will take with you,
the silence you will leave behind.
by T.M. Johnson
Previously published in Bay Leaves
WHEN THE STOPLIGHT CHANGES
Oak trees without leaves,
black branches, two dimensional
like back roads on an old map.
Cold, gray-draped sky, a curtain
for the practical joke of winter:
wet blackness then gray dampness.
But this morning, the sun seeps
orange, bright beneath the curtain,
its first rays, bent and brittle
on frost-touched streets. At the stoplight
in the next car, a young woman,
her summer-blonde hair free
to her neon green jacket.
She looks past me to the sun,
turning toward its light,
and she is singing. Through the glass
I cannot hear the words,
but I see them forming and know
they’re about falling in love.
When the stoplight changes,
I speed away until
she’s no longer in my rear view mirror,
until the only song is an old song
playing on the radio.
by T.M. Johnson
Previously published in Pembroke Magazine.
LESSONS
You’re at it again, teaching your dog
Sit and Stay, in the backyard,
on a day when you recognize autumn,
and you want the last breaths of October
to curl around you, the warmth
to layer under your jacket.
You repeat a command, hoping
to accumulate meaning,
but she’s not getting much of it,
preferring to watch for other forms of life.
Maybe time is pushing you,
the sun focusing its orange lens,
shadows spiking through the trees.
So you say, Okay, Stupid…Stay.
By now, you know how to say it—
frustration in the words but at a pitch
that rings with love in her ears.
And because you’re the human here—
aware of time, taught to control love—
you believe she should listen.
But she was smallest in a litter of eleven.
She learned the tumbling blindness,
the frenetic search for a free nipple,
then she learned the moment and the warmth.
So as you step back, you remind yourself,
Never punish the dog that comes to you.
by T.M. Johnson
This poem is my wife’s favorite of my poems. It is also unlike my other poetry. Mmm.
DEM BONES
Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it,
unearth it, and gnaw at it still.—Thoreau
When the man with no bones hit New York,
the line extended around the block.
Some would walk by just to see him
lying in his cotton suit puddle.
Others would ask his advice
and prize his every word.
They would tell their friends:
He’s no bonehead. He would never rib you.
He has no bones to pick.
A TV network heard about him,
and he was on their morning show.
At first, he kept slipping beneath the coffee table,
but at the commercial they pinned him to the sofa.
They asked about his occupation.
-Surveillance, just slides under locked doors.
And even about his love life.
-Treated by most women like a bad stain.
As luck would have it,
a famous orthopedist saw the show
and called in offering to do
the first complete bone transplant:
two hundred and six separate operations,
connecting each bone to another,
from the toe bone to the head bone,
one bone at a time.
Years of surgery and pain,
then finally, he walked around
just like you and me,
did everything just like you and me,
and, of course, no one cared.
In the past week, we’ve had an earthquake. a hurricane, and yesterday, a hailstorm. Mother Nature has certainly been strutting her stuff. The hailstorm reminded me of an older poem that I’m posting this month.
THE HAILSTORM
My father and I stood
silent under the barn shelter
as cold, dark wind swarmed over
the late May heat.
He looked straight ahead
never risking the eye of God,
this tanned, still young man
who always called himself
dirt farmer, who never
spoke of crops without adding,
if we can save them.
Even before the heavy, sagging
drumbeats in the trees,
we sensed the storm,
what we’d learned through generations—
he through his father, I through him.
And my father’s eyes never veered
even with the tin, ringing
cymbals of the barn shelter.
I stood unmoving beside him,
swallowing his anger.
But within me—
an urge to rush, grab
handfuls of hailstones,
shout, See, they melt,
and hear someone,
some man, some woman,
there under the shelter or since,
answer, I know…I know.
by T.M. Johnson
Previously published in Wellspring.
FAITH
What is learned from the stars?
From Sagittarius drawing back
his bow but unable to let go?
Or Aquarius still spilling
the flood from his cup?
From the Milky Way,
with its whorls of light
like the fingerprint of God?
Or beyond, beyond,
from a star
whose light
is yet to reach us?
by T.M. Johnson
Pepper on the Tongue 