mother

The Quiet Ones

John Manesis

John Manesis is a retired physician whose poetry has appeared in over fifty literary publications, including Wisconsin Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Zone 3, The Lyric, and Measure. His first poetry book, With All My Breath, was published in 2003 and his second, Other Candle Lights, was published in 2008.

That Summer

The roof burned continuously.
I passed long hours learning

the names of various shades of blue –
Air Force blue, cornflower blue,

Persian blue, periwinkle.
Night came early where I lived

with my mother and three brothers
and no one to read to me to sleep,

though the herd of clouds grazing
at the end of the street would always

lift their big, shaggy heads to listen.

Balloons

Barefoot the children are running, their fists in the air.
They laugh a ticklish laughter, not the mind’s.
The strings they clutch are as thin as the air at this altitude.
What are they running from? Ask a forget-me-not.
Sunflowers read their passage from west to east.
The flowers are foreground: beyond them, the precipice.
A broom of a wind swishes across a footprint.
That little piggy was hearing, that little piggy was vision....

My Father Forgot

The Great Ocean Road

A hot-wired spirit sparking in the rain,
you jolted me to life, unfroze my heart,
and all my tangled currents you'd explain
as if you read my bathymetric chart.
We ran with leaf-shaped boards into the sea,
birds wheeling, wave noise tossing up white spray;
I dived, holding your breath, and learnt to breathe
on southern coasts where fire and water play.