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The Writing Forum Presents
Poetry by Anthony Watkins
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The Writing Forum’s Poet of the Month - January 2004
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POET’S BIO:
I have been at various times, and still am for the most part, the following: poet,
construction worker, used bookstore owner, truck driver, local and over the road custom budder of pecan trees, pig farmer, salesman of house plants, cars, home remodeling services, Pepsi products and advertising publisher and editor of a literary quarterly Abundance - A Harvest of Life, Literature & Art. Born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1959, I have lived nearly half of my life in Alabama and the other half in Florida. I grew up deeply religious, conservative and am now an agnostic liberal active Democrat.
My website “Abundance Poetry Exchange” may be accessed by clicking here.
Also my Blog “Night Heron Poets” where you can also participate, may be
accessed by clicking here.
Email: uplandpoet@bellsouth.net
The End of Expectations
We have planned and painted
Shopped and designed your nursery
We have dreamed of all the things,
The smiles, the tears, the joy and weariness
You are sure to bring
From Valentines Day, when we first began
To expect you, through the heady days
Of baby showers, ultrasounds and naming
On to now, when you are so ready to come
To you room of soft light and Pooh borders
Your mother moves slowly and tires of your weight
But in five days we will end the expecting
And begin the love of suckling, diapers
Rocking and cooing, knowing full well
How tiny fingers can grasp one's heart
You, Christopher, are loved in advance
And have been for nearly a year,
With awe, joy, and a bit of sheer terror
We look forward to the end of expecting
And the beginning of the unexpected.
©Anthony Watkins
10/13/04
On Passing Into That Good Night
There are times when it seems welcome
Though I always said I would fight,
Like my grandmother, at eighty-six
Not ready, yet to go, stillliving every moment
But sometimes it seems like along and welcome sleep
To rest my weary self forever in the stillness
Of the last and lasting good night
No more worries, peace,at last
Then I think of all I love,the people
The places, the food, the land
And every cause I hold dear
But most of all my love
For my babies, my wife, friends and family
That I will never see soon enough,
And I rise to fight against the sun, the traffic and stress of work
Somedays I would welcome the good night
But not today, not yet, I do not lay my burdens down
I live another day, for you and for me.
©Anthony Watkins
Very First One
When I look into your sleeping face
And see what you have become
Since this day one year ago
How long and how short a year
A new born in my arms
I held you with love and hope and fear
Knowing you, like your brothers wouldgrow
Too fast, too soon be grown and gone
Wondering if I was too old
To be a good father, to even live
Long enough for you to have what you need
Sometimes I still wonder. But I know
I love you more every day, little boy of the lights
You are a blessing to this soon to be old man
A gift I am grateful for, so I say
Happy Birthday, Christopher, Happy very first one!
©Anthony Watkins
There Stands a Post in My Backyard
There stands a post in my backyard
I am sure some school age child
Is the cause of its being there
Once a shiny red post
With a bird feeder and a pinwheel
For a weather vane
Set just so, for best viewing
From her Mama's kitchen window
A proud and glowing child, I'm sure
Today, the pin wheel is missing
As is the glass from the feeder
In fact the post is barely visable
Some volunteer vine, half way
Between trumpet and poison ivy
Covers it, a green coat from base to top
What pieces of wood still show
Are faded, twisted and splintered
But I hate to remove some child's dream
So there stands a post in my backyard
©Anthony Watkins
Today the Paint is Fresh
Though the house is old,
Today the paint is fresh
And the caulking new
On the front gallery
The rails and post are from trees
Not long dead and felled
And while I can admire
The prettiness of the new
I am yearning for the day
When the wood is weathered
And the paint fades and peals
Then I will sit, foot upon the rail
One of the old men of my street
Watching the children pass by
Drinking my green tea and smiling
No longer the shiny new
But the old always there porch
And I the old always there man
Today the paint is fresh
And we don't even yet have the chair
©Anthony Watkins
I Would Not Be Graveyard Dirt
Who stirs up my dust and will not let me sleep?
The earth of my bones does not belong as a curse
Upon the steps of a stranger, leave me be
I caused enough trouble alive, let me stay gone
A memory, an ancient fading, to be recalled
At Christmas and on the day of my birth
By those who were cursed with me in life
Let the strangers alone with me
Let me remain, inert lost dirt in some graveyard
Who stirs my dust? May their curse be on them.
©Anthony Watkins
5/11/03
The Seven Pound Cup of Coffee
Well, maybe all the weight isn't coffee
The great black mug might be half,
Thick to hold the heat against the morning
I gently nurse and occasional chug
The cooling extract of my favorite drug
And pound the keyboard in the dark
Of predawn, the hours of death,
But my coffee keeps me from dying today
Even though the doctors all agree
My seven pound cup of coffee will close my veins
And raise my pressure and one day the magic
Will turn and kill instead of wake
Until then, I strain my wrist and raise
The mighty mug to my lips for another shot
©Anthony Watkins
5/10/03
After the Door Had Opened
And I walked through like a man
Proud to be a pig farmer,
A truck driver, a jock with a rifle
And a poet stealing from the Bible
I don't know who went first, Hemingway or Twain?
Maybe Doctor King, preaching, marching and dying
It sure wasn't Wallace, the one I got to meet
It had to be Grandma from the last century
With a silver braid all down her back
And every word said to be heard, meant and understood
After the door had opened I picked up my pen
Wrote it all down for you to remember
Like it was something that happened to you
Just my notes, just me passing through
©Anthony Watkins 2003
How to See Alabama
We could eat at Chris'
The place where Bubba buys the dogs.
We could buy barbecue
From old black men at country stores
And pick our real tomatoes.
I could walk you through pecan orchards
That I worked in.
We could freeze our bottoms
Panning for gold in a shaded summer creek.
It might not be too bad that way
©Anthony Watkins
Glamour of Poverty
I sit on the ground
Three languages from home
And look into sincere Mayan eyes
The strange smell of burning
From trees I do not recognize
Mixes with the chilling mist
And drifts over native
And alien alike, smoking
The fried bread air between us.
Children, not hungry,
But with an appetite
Stare at the stranger that I am
From the glamour of poverty
Like a National Geographic cover
And the innocence I project.
Is this not just another
Day at the office in Belize?
©Anthony Watkins
No Seepage
Grease and water run together
In thin sheets on the parking lot
As I walk down Madison
For an early Krystal lunch.
My cousin overpays for a car wash
While I eat and contemplate
Her mother's grave and a stranger's
Mausoleum with moldy seepage
Growing and dripping onto the granite walls
After shopping for a toilet repair kit
We visit my dying aunt
Whose husband we buried yesterday
With the dead and the living attended
I remove the tank and replace the bolts
Set the new gasket and tighten
There is no seepage here.
©Anthony Watkins
5/17/03
The Water Carvers
Tiny light bony fingers
Etch scratches, gathering
I know not what
Dart away mostly in time
To be spared consumption
By the churning bass
Who carves baroque
Arches and chandeliers
As graceful as itself
But the bony fingered mosquito
Only succeeds in feeding
The greedy gliding duck
Who turns a furrowed molding
More perfect the carpenter's routing
Yet a minute passes
And the water lies flat again.
Anthony Watkins
©1/20/04
The Sweat of Horses
The flies rise up out of the dust
With a hum and a glisten of light
Black iridescent wings flash
And the horses swish their tails
As the clopping hooves echo mutedly
Against the thick green woods
The dust covers the wagon wheels
Pressing hard under the load
The team pulls against the drag of dust
Pulls an overloaded wagon and me,
I ride like one more fly as the cargo shifts
And the sweat of the horses gleam
Into a foam on the necks straining
Up a rise in the mid August heat
Flecks fall into the dust turning it brown
Under the steady well shod feet
I dream of the creek near by
And know the horses smell the water
I wonder of what they dream
While the sweat of horses falls into the dust.
Anthony Watkins
©12/20/03
What to Do When God is Gone
It wasn't the way he started parking
The old white Rambler American station wagon
Three blocks away on the other side of the bridge
That crossed the river that used to flood
Years before I was born
It wasn't the way he started cooking with butter
And calling me his father's name
And asking about the garden we haven't planted
Since I was a boy, worrying about the bugs on the squash and the tomatoes
It was the songs he hummed, wordlessly over and again
The songs he used to sing, songs he wrote for himself
I go over on Saturdays and wash the car to the pearly white,
So it still looks like it did
The day he drove it home in nineteen-sixty-four
But I wonder every time I have to go get it
And drive it across that old bridge
Should I hide the keys, should he still be alone?
When will I know, and how long before god is gone?
Will he reset all the presets on that old AM radio
Or cut out the little diamonds on the vinyl seats
How will I know, what will the sign be?
To tell me when its time to take god back home?
And who will I ask what to do after he is gone?
©Anthony Watkins
A SMALL GOD
"It is good to be
a minor god", she said,
"To command, with certainty,
the sun to rise
and again to set,
The spring to thaw,
The winter to freeze,
these I command."
"A small god must know
one's limits and powers,
I do not curse the wind,
only stones that can not move."
"It is good to be
A small god," she thought,
"No cathedrals for pigeons
nor bats to defile."
She stirred the pot and smiled.
©Anthony Watkins
A MOTHER'S DREAM
Obsidian, the mother,
nurses her child, the gift,
dreaming of freedom and home.
A GOD-CHILD MUST SURELY
NOT DIE IN CHAINS AS SHE WAS BORN.
The plantation is mild in winter,
but there is no cool place now,
sweat gathers on her nipple,
mixing with Gumbo's milky meal.
Black tiny eyes follow her fingers,
Cotton, snowy white, tears
at her fingers in contrast
to the sweet suckling.
Obsidian knows joy and sadness
like ice and fire in one stone.
Her gift is hope for a light
she will never see,
the light of freedom's train
taking her children home
TO MYTHICAL AFRICAN KINGDOMS.
©Anthony Watkins
Soft Shoe
He used to wear Hushpuppies,
Gray and brown,
Now its Birkenstocks, with socks
He's growing old as a modern man
Without pedigree or pedicure
He takes comfort as it comes.
or alternatively with easy rhymes:
He used to wear Hushpuppies
Brown and gray
Now its Birkenstocks, with socks
He's growing old a modern man,
The modern way
Without pedigree or pedicure
He takes comfort where he can.
Anthony Watkins
©2/04/04
French Poodle Women
I know these French Poodle women
Who only travel by train
And the silly perfume eating men
Who gladly follow them to Paris
Even if the train runs from Chicago
Even when the ocean turns to rain
Too many nights of cigarettes
And champagne have clouded the station
Ticket men and conductors agree
We need more lake front commuters
And less French Poodle women
Riding from Chicago to Champaign
© Anthony Watkins
Nature's Landing at Cedar Key
Gleaming white metal kitchen appliances
And third floor darkness on the balcony
As the sunset sky turns from orange to ink,
The wind picks up and the birds dive.
Soon the draining mud flats are as lost
As my hometown everyday worries
The soft hum of the A/C defends me
From sweat and biting bugs.
Creaky old shops and Annie's for lunch,
Museums with enshrined sand dollars
And framed marriage certificates,
Midden mounds with a view
Of everything between Cuba and Mexico
Charm us like a lazy swim where mockingbirds
Come bathe in the shallow end,
And we, in turn, walk the pier and commune with pelicans
Busy tiny crabs work the receding shore
With a vigor only matched by my languor.
©Anthony Watkins
5/15/04
Folks on the Porch
The brightness of eight o'clock
On this mid-May evening
Falls on the three girls
Like the light air on their skin
The rust-red metal pole
Acts as a column of support
On the mud-yellow front porch
Of a US-One hotel
The fat white girl lounges
On a folding lawn chair,
Falling out of it on all sides
While her skinny friends lean
Against the warm wall and laugh
In small puffs, like the trails of smoke
From the discount label cigarettes
They smoke in the post sunset Florida
Until they flip the butts
On the grassed over gravel drive
That circles around the empty pool
Their uniforms of smudged white T-shirts
Bare feet and faded shorts give no sign
Of their reason for being here
And my small white car flashes past
Without giving sign that I observed.
©Anthony Watkins
5/12/04
The Fruit I Eat
I hold her red ripe fruit in my hands,
Cupping the fullness in each palm
With the taste of stolen salt, I eat
Thinking with my teeth,
My lips and my tongue.
As these remember every mouthful
In a lifetime of mouthfuls,
I swallow the fruit and all its juices
And am satisfied, yet long for more.
Can one eat too many tomatoes?
©Anthony Watkins
Stanleyville
Elsewhere under gray tweed skies
England's great tyrants are but
Pale ghosts of oppression
Here the sky boils in the paisley
Of a French smoking jacket
Thoughtfully fit with no place for hands,
The kindly Belgian touch.
The baskets woven by Congolese hands
Filled to overflowing with red-stumped
Black Congolese hands, proof of payment
For slackenedness, to be counted by the dear king
If a misplaced white man dies,
If the random missionary baby is gutted
Like a fatted pig, in the name of Jesus
Where is the sacrifice, and for whom does it atone?
Are not the blood and the dirt already mixed?
Is not the air a breath of death four hundred years old?
Is Stanleyville no more? Are we no more than it?
In forty years, around the blue ball what have we learned?
What have we changed? Welcome to Fallujah!
©Anthony Watkins
In What Corner Breakfast?
(or England Has Its Kipper)
I wonder about the habits of others
Mostly as a narcissistic extension
Of my own awareness
This morning I wonder at breakfast,
Mine, of course, and whom might join me
For hot green tea and cold boiled corn
The corn is silver and yellow, leftovers
From last night's supper, chilled on the cob
Tastes between a mountain stream and sunshine
But who in the world, in some strange corner
Makes a regular breakfast of hot green tea
And corn cold on the cob?
Not that I would forsake eggs and toast, with coffee,
With biscuits, grits, bacon and sausage optional,
These I thought standard fare the world over
But I have learned that fish is common in places
Other than the odd southerner's catfish,
Fried with eggs and toast, England has its kipper
But in what corner do they know the joy
That awoke my mouth this morning?
©Anthony Watkins
Painting in the Dark
She stands in the night of late July heat
Outside her own door
A brown wood door
On a broad dark porch
The welcoming light is dim and friendly
But poor light for a painter
She tapes the jamb
Later to be painted white
Painting in the dark
And everything remains without color
Until the Sunday sun rises
To show a glorious red door.
©Anthony Watkins
7/24/05
Not Your Hurricane
I'm not your hurricane
I may be a long way from your idea
Of a sunny day
But don't pull down
No shutters on me
I'm not your hurricane
I'm no wind a'tall
When the wind comes whistling
When it comes a screamin' you will know
Its past time to bar the door
Its time to move to higher ground
But I'm not that kind of storm
Maybe the dreary afternoon
Mid summer sluggish with heat
You'll see me coming sound asleep
Drifting down stream no work do I
If you think this is stormy weather
When the real rain comes
Where you gonna hide?
Don't pull no shutter on me.
~ Inspired by Winn-Dixie ~
©July 1, 2005
May Liberty Be My God
We are but free people
And come without gun or sword
We come with no fear of a master
As we serve only truth and liberty
You may send hired men
To kill us for bananas and oil
Let them fight over crowns
And boxes of gold and diamonds
We are proud to live free
With empty hands and empty pockets
And though we die we live long
In the struggles of free people
Though you kill the buffalo
And send trains to the coast
You are captive of your tyranny
We are but free poeple
If we gather stones together,
They are only for building
If we light fires in the night
We are only keeping warm
We are but free people
And come without gun or sword.
©Anthony Watkins
May 8, 2005
Like fires in the rain
The man in the hood
Keeps moving with his torch
Of gas soaked rags on a long stick
Burning against a gray sky
Water everywhere, running down my street
Washing clean the gutters
Overflowing the street sewers
He keeps on torching the trash
And the neighborhood
Is in flames among the raindrops
And my wipers slap at the deluge
But the glass stays blurred
With fast drops that fall
As I watch his arsonic ways
And wonder if the temple of fire
Will survive Noah's return
And yet be smothered by Issac's ashes.
©Anthony Watkins
May 2, 2005
The Mail Came Today
The mail came today
Expected, like the weather,
But not rejoiced in any more
Than warm weather causes
Rejoicing in Florida in May
But it was there, assorted junk,
Self important bills, and as expected
No letter from an old friend
Like the one that did not come
The day before and the day before
But the man in short blue pants
And a fluffy gray beard smiled
As is his custom, no matter
If the mail be junk, joy or gloom
The dogs bark, the mothers push strollers
And the sun grows towards its summer
Burning my face and killing my grass
I stack the mail on the table
So she can sort it and tell what came
I could read it myself, but it is only
The mail, and that is expected
Without rejoicing, without rain.
©Anthony Watkins
4/26/05
There is a Rose in Jerusalem
There is a rose in Jerusalem
As beautiful as the day
And I am going to see it bloom
For my God is mighty
And I carry Jehovah's sword
I will drive out the infidels
And if I die I will be in Paradise
There is a rose in Jerusalem
As beautiful as the day
And I am going to see it bloom
For my God is mighty
And I carry Allah's sword
I will drive out the infidels
And if I die I will be n Paradise
There is a rose in Jerusalem
As red as the blood of all the true believers
Who are as pure as the morning air
Who are going to die there
May it bloom forever as a reminder
That it is not for God or Glory we die.
©Anthony Watkins
Somewhere, Someday
Somewhere a Bob Dylan song plays
Somewhere a train whistles
Its heavy way towards a crossing
Somewhere its after two am
But that's not here
In this fifty-year-old house
With a bug eaten hardwood board
That crackles under my foot
All is quiet, except the board
And the early morning tap of keys
Someday old friends will come by
Some might even stay this late
Or even overnight, come for spades
Politics or poetry or dinner or old books
But that's not tonight
Tonight it's just me crackling my floor board
And wife and baby fast asleep
©Anthony Watkins
3/17/05
Glorious Colors for a Blind Man
The tub drains and so does the sink
There's a great hole in the floor
A hole I crawled through into the dead dust
Of the underside of our utility room
I spent as much time sistering the joists
And cutting the decking
As I did cutting cast iron
My overweight, overadged, underused body aches
She paints, still, she painted all day
The boring white baseboard
Then hours of taping, it seemed like hours
Now the glorious colors roll on
And I, I was supposed to be sleeping
But Christopher smiles from his swing
Long past bedtime, long past being rocked
And fed and changed and burped, he smiles
And I stare blindly onto my keyboard,
Typing without glasses
Glasses three rooms away,
A distance too great for my weariness
©Anthony Watkins
3/12/05
Sympathy for the Man on the Balcony
For the first time I feel a sense
Of the well-heeled refugee
Sitting on a balcony of a fine hotel
And sipping Parisian coffee.
While the Sixty Minutes corespondent
Asks about the colapse of Lebanon
Or the Congo, and the well edited
Footage counterposes of border camps
Muddy muddled tents and shacks with soldiers
Razor wire, dysentry and rats gnawing
On oversized bags of Red Cross rice.
I would watch from my middle-class den
And think, "He's no refugee!"
Now I know better. I, too, am homeless
Not living in the street, but living in comfort.
Staying in a luxury apartment loaned
By family, but even in comfort,
Even with money in hand
Homelessness is a curse.
The street is certainly worse in every way,
But I crave turning the key in my own door again.
~*~
The moon and stars belong to those in darkness.
~*~
©Anthony Watkins
3/4/05
Seven Thousand Mornings
She says, "Eat your breakfast."
I'm holding our new baby
Trying to give him a bottle
But he's too busy smiling and cooing
And then I realize that we will be
Saying the same thing to Christopher
For the next several years
For the next seven thousand mornings
Then he will be like the others
Grown and gone, out in the world
The child whom we built our life around
Moves on to build a new life
Weekly phone calls to report
On life at work, the wife and kids
Telling his own toddler who dwaddles
In a high chair to eat his breakfast
Seven thousand more mornings
And I'll be gone and my baby
Will be my age and his babies grown
Leaving him to deal with an empty nest
But today I wake to a smiling boy
Who plays and coos and takes a bottle
While stealing his daddy's heart
I'll try not to miss a morning.
©Anthony Watkins
My Father Lived in a Land of Darkness
I go out at two in the morning of all things, to walk my dog
A dog who for six years was happy to go out at eight in the morning
And again about eight in the evening,
But now with the baby, two am is shift change,
The house is awake, so he demands a walk,
This dog who is more scared of the dark than I am
Yet we stand in the early morning darkness
Away from his beloved lightpost
He sniffs the earth and I stare at the sky.
At forty-five I cannot remember when
The land was dark at night
Though in early rural childhood
It was pretty close to inky black
With brilliant stars thick as gnats
But my father was born before the light
Before rural electrification came to Mississippi
His skies were nearly as dark as the caveman's
And on long summer nights he saw stars I will never see.
Yet as the world glows brighter by the day
I am certain I am seeing some stars tonight
That neither I nor my sons shall see ever again from this planet
Though I would trade them again for the light against the old darkness,
Not of night, but of ideas that also covered the land
When my father was young
And I believe the two lights are somehow entwined
But as I celebrate the modern enlightenment as it comes
I can only mourn the loss of a dark night sky.
©Anthony Watkins
1/09/05
If There is a God
- If there is a God,
And maybe there is
And he is in his heaven,
Where else would he be?
Sure we spend the day singing
In the glorious sunshine of eternity,
But before that, every morning in the softly lit kitchen
With the great pot of fresh steaming black coffee
Those of us who care for this sort of thing,
Sit on stools and make meatloaf sandwiches
With mayo and ketchup and white bread
Sip coffee and listen, while God leans
Against the counter and tells stories,
Some we've heard before and new ones everyday.
One day I suggest we use meatloaf with celery in it
And God gives me that look, the one
He uses when he is pretending to be angry
And says, I was making meatloaf like this
Before there was celery.
You can use celery when you are God!
I smile and say no more
But the next morning I notice mine
Was cooked with celery,
He winks, but says nothing.
On God's birthday, some of us get up early
And make biscuits and sausage and grits and toast
And scramble a big plate of eggs
And one of the saints who can really cook
Makes God a pair of sunny side up
Its funny, after all he's done
But everytime, this little breakfast feast
Makes tears come into his forever eyes
And he mumbles something about humans
Then we finish our coffee and go sing.
©Anthony Watkins
Not If I Can Help It!
The young man stands over the crib
At twenty-two he knows nothing,
Not even how little he knows
But with love and joy he makes it
Through the long night of crying
A half a decade, and a different city
He walks and rocks and feeds
A new baby boy, with a veteran's surety
But still no sense of the clock
That will make both boys men so soon
Two more decades and another city
He walks and rocks and knows the magic
Knowing this is the last son
The son of an old man, a last blessing
Who will grow and be gone, leaving too soon
Leaving in time only for the man to finish life
This one he promises to hold tight
Through the short years, to not miss the moments
But life presses in, and he loses focus
And the boy grows and life passes
The long distance calls, the chitchat
Another baby gone, the old man remembers.
©Anthony Watkins
 
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