Two Poems
Ethan McGuire
Morning Fog, April 2020
Encountering an unexpected fog
on a morning drive from Pensacola to Tallahassee,
travelling from one hospital to another for work.
The fog rising up
from frost-brittled grass,
descending to meet us
from hovering clouds,
obscurants the sun
until it seems lunar.
I flip on my headlights
and painfully squint
th-roúgh this dense mist
still rolling across
the highway and lingering.
Does every new dawning
now wake the same way?
- - -
The Ancient Oak
The grand, old oak sits, bearded,
peering over our old pond,
pondering neither life nor death
nor time nor space.
He does not think about our crops
and how they will turn out this year
or whether it will rain tomorrow.
Thousands of birds take shelter in his branches,
benefitting much, but not appreciating, crying.
He tells them tales upon the wind—
the birds don’t care.
The oak contents himself
with a certain knowledge,
unknown but still existent.
Beneath his bent, old branches:
Happiness and gloom,
Coming and going,
gusts of wind, and troubles—
mallards swimming, ducklings trailing,
herons carefully hunting frogs.
- - -
Ethan’s notes: “‘Morning Fog, April 2020’ is a poem in an unusual anapestic dimeter blank verse. ‘The Ancient Oak’ is in a somewhat loose iambic blank verse but with varying line lengths, and it is about a tree I spent many days under as a kid.”
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Ethan McGuire is a writer and computer scientist whose essays, poems, short stories, and translations have appeared in Blue Unicorn, The Dispatch, Emerald Coast Review, New Verse News, VoegelinView, and other publications. He is an editor at Tar River Poetry, Literary Matters, and New Verse Review and the author of Songs for Christmas and Apocalypse Dance. Ethan lives with his wife and children in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
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