Steve Wilson
Two Poems
On Uncertainty
Everywhere the weave
between us loosens,
weakens. Threads fray. This
morning, before light,
old fears, familiars—
windows rattled by
sudden thunder, sounds
shaped within darkness—
brought an odd comfort.
Who knows what, in doubt,
may carry us through?</p
Safety
After months of isolation
and fear, I have begun to
shy, instinctively, from friends,
people on the sidewalks,
from my own grown children
no longer welcome inside
the home where they were raised.
I have come to reckon my backyard
is a compound, my chain-link fence
protection from whatever menace
threatens invisible beyond. You
have to wonder, I muse
during another scant afternoon
with the lawn and the birds,
how long will you seek security
in such otherless, darkening,
echoes of space and silence.
—Submitted on 12/25/2020
Steve Wilson is the author of Lose to Find (Finishing Line Press, 2018), The Reaches (Finishing Line Press, 2019), and three other collections. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Georgetown Quarterly, Midwest Quarterly, New American Writing, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including O Taste and See: Food Poems (Bottom Dog Press, 2003), Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by Robert Frost (University of Iowa, 2005), Is This Forever or What?: Poems and Paintings from Texas, (Greenwillow Books, 2004), and others. Wilson holds a BA from the University of Oklahoma, and an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State. He lives in San Marcos, Tex., where he is a professor of English at Texas State University.
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