Sands

sands

How much sand do you have?
The old man snarled,
dragging on the cigarette
The fish weren't biting

His son half asleep on the narrow bank
Suspended in the cold, slow moving fog
Listless as his mother, the old man thought
Like a sheet caught up
in last spring's big storm
Hanging from a broken branch
Nobody even noticed

(The boy hated every minute with his old man
The pre-dawn gloom reminded him of a tomb
Some dusty Italian tomb
where dreary vampires lay
Stakes driven through their hearts
into velvet cushions)

Sand for what? the boy sighed,
quickly adding
Can I have the sandwich now,
the bacon Mom made?
The old man said nothing
just stared off into the fog

The barge sank three days later
A high school student played Shakespeare
In an original one-act play
about creative depression
The algae in the river fed
until there was no river

Later the boy found a meteorite in Iraq,
the sand fused
The bullet caught him between the plates
of the jacket
He died drowning in his own rich red blood

His father coughed bent nearly double
in the E-Z chair
The wife had bought him
for their 20th anniversary
A small flag tilted in the courtyard
of the high school
The industrious ants pushing away the sand
Carrying the crystals across the name plate
As if crossing a great land bearing a great fish.


Richard Lance Williams

Posted over on Poets Against the War

Ric wrote: I have written about poetry since 1988 for the Austin Chronicle. I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. My father, Aubrey R. Williams, fought in that war. He was a lifer in the Marine Corps. He fully supported my decision. He died three days after the Iraq war began. He was against this war, too.