Roberta’s Grace

I.
The west-to-east wind
breathes the leavings
from a few naked groves 
across to up against 
where there’s no more field;
it creates a waiting
on the verge of woods like an
invasion.

But the fodder stays, relents
puts up no fight
shows itself in piles
to the lorn few
or the theologians or the simple
or the true
in all this angled light
the small houses
the spare lots, the pines
the hardwood
all are convinced
the dry months
will come
and cold.
And cold.

II.
Roberta smiles through broken glass
of west facing windows
sees highways cracked and broken,
road-tar having oozed
from a thousand Augusts, now
as still as Rome.
She smiles without knowing that
her own empire stumbles
and falls down
to only a trace.

As the day turns red
out towards Columbus
she watches as some lights
come-on
beyond a hedge
out under where 
the linings of
clouds make 
bloodshot edges.
The sky behind 
has already lost blue for gray
for black
and Roberta chuckles
at all the overlap
the lifespans make,
shortening our idea
of forever.

III.
The grace of those numbers
too big to consider
the size of that sky is there
whether noticed
or not and the God of such distance
as to be here and here
soaks Roberta’s fabric, utterly.
And what she wears
can’t lose its weather
being a host
for those things
never to be
tagged.

℘℘℘℘

L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in Rattle, Versal, The Reader, Galway Review, Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. He is the author of four collections and ten chapbooks of poetry, including his latest collection – Green Shoulders: New and Selected Poems 2003–2023 (Silver Bow, 2023). He is a retired lawyer and teacher of literature, and he writes and plays music. Abel resides in rural Georgia, USA.