The early light reflects the short gray hairs
among the brown, and still he’s just a boy
of twenty-five, who rises slowly, turns
to stare down at the bed where she coils
asleep, the dreamless sleep that only comes
on nights when he has filled her up with rain.
He brought it with him out of Dublin slums,
to blanket California hills in gray
soft shrouds. He waits for gold to turn to green.
He lingers over tea and toast until
he’s read the Times. Packing his bag to leave;
he has no ties to things that keep her still
beneath their weight ― a job, this house, her car.
It’s almost Christmas, and Ireland’s not so far.
***
Trina Gaynon is a graduate of the M.F.A. writing program at the University of San Francisco. She currently volunteers in Los Angeles with WriteGirl, providing workshops and mentors for young women in high school who are interested in writing, and works with a literacy program in her community. Recently, her poems have appeared in Natural Bridge, Runes, 26, Southeast Review and the anthology Bombshells: War Stories and Poems by Women on the Homefront and Yemassee. She says, “My deeply divided personality moves back and forth between writing sonnets, a way of exploring what I have to say, and more experimental work, a way of exploding into what I need to say.”
This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:
Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA
300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian.
30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information. http://vallance22.hpage.com/