Ralph Monday- Two Poems

Ralph Monday is Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 50 journals. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014. A book Empty Houses and American Renditions was published May 2015 by Aldrich Press. A Kindle chapbook Narcissus the Sorcerer was published June 2015 by Odin Hill Press.
Website: Ralph Monday

The Old Days

I remember as a child in the old days

when the winters were white and cold

and dark, there in the cellar my grandparents

kept the year’s bounty so that we might

eat in the long, unfruitful months:

potatoes and butternut squash, onions with

the roots still attached, dirt clinging like

ants on a drop of honey, tubers and turnips

and yellow shelled baskets of corn.

All waited patiently in the shadows for my

grandmother to gather and turn into a table

feast.

Now, those days are gone. The trips to the local

Kroger or Wal-Mart a poor substitute for the

love found in that cellar.

Full Wolf Moon

In this month the bone polished

orb brings lamenting hunger

cries from the wolves in the

forest say the old Native folk

that have lived in the blood of the

land for millennia.

Though detached from the

land that hunger mirrors the

appetite of man:

hunger for salvation,

for material, perishing goods,

for love,

for sex,

for blindness to mute the

inevitable throb in the

gut taking all toward

the wolf’s cry,

without thought,

without understanding,

forgetting that the moon has

always been there to

guide the way.