"And the crows..." and "Ellen and Roman"
And the crows...
“Dad!” the woman next door screams
as she finds her father dead
In his lawn chair, having expired
of a stroke at ninety-two.
◦ And the crows keep cawing.
Ellen and Roman
(For Jeanne Patrovic)
Ellen was a lovable child
With hair as light as flax,
It flowed around a Roman nose
That shown boldly, like a parallax.
While Ellen flourished
In middle-class Sayville,
Poor Roman in the Bronx
Died at Christmas of fentanyl,
To which day-care guardians
Had exposed him, killing him
Softly with holiday chemistry.
So this becomes a fentanyl story,
Not a story about Ellen,
The lovable child of line 1.
"And the crows..." previously appeared in Some Birds (Goldfish Press, 2024)
George Held, an eleven-time Pushcart nominee, has written or edited 22 poetry books on subjects as varied as war, love, art, and nature in forms such as the haiku, cinquain, triolet, sonnet, villanelle, and sestina. His most recently published poems appear in Blue Unicorn, Better than Starbucks, First Literary Review—East, and Neuro Logical (Ireland).
