Summer Slow - John Grey

Lightning bugs sparkle.
Crickets rub the teeth of their wings.
Cicada tymbals click.
My Providence backyard swoons in night's heat.
Darkness doesn't cool,
merely adds another suffocating layer.
I lie on a chaise lounge,
witness the indifferent mounting of the stars.
a moon that seems to sweat with haze.
There's enough Summer here
for a boy to play until
he can no longer see his hands.
The temperature would still be on his side.
his scrawny frame fueled by mercury in the nineties.
He'd try to snare those lightning bugs
with clapping hands.
He'd scour the long grass for chirring cricket
and the tree bark for a cicada
blowing its voice box on a mate.
No way he'd be lazy and defer
to the thickness of the air.
He wouldn't be crying out for a beer.
Not even a lemonade.
It would take a lot of burned off energy
for him to be so drained
this modern version of an ancient fainting couch
would feel like rescue.
It would take years,
as many years as I've lived.
It's a typical July evening
in a sultry, comatose ordinary neighborhood.
I do hear some shouts of joy
but from many fences hence.
Time, to me, seems pathetically long-winded
even though there is no wind.
Once it was as brief as a lightning bug's flash,
a cricket's modest music scale,
a cicada's febrile pitch.
Back then, I can't believe
these insects ever needed to repeat themselves.

Originally published by Songs Of Eretz, June 2020

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, City Brink and Tenth Muse. Latest books, “Subject Matters”,” Between Two Fires” and “Covert” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Broken Plate, Amazing Stories and River and South.