It haunts me so
those summer nights
in dim lit homes

where music flows
and tempers flare
and lullabies fill the air.

I while away the hours
under the electric swell of light,
(pulse—scorched out).

Bone-idle and coral pink,
this dry spell grills,
but Southern nights do fill me.

Spider-blue legs peddle tales
as gossips-a-brewing
and roaming by my streets.

Scuttling through like marsh rabbit,
neighbors wave their charmed hellos.
Feverish and swollen together,

they inhale the blossoms,
riding high, and move through summer
as the lake declines.

It haunts me so
those summer nights
in dim lit homes

where music flows
and tempers flare
and lullabies fill the air.

©2008, Mary Hamrick

Mary Hamrick was born in New York and moved to Florida as a young girl; her writing often reflects the contrast between her Northern and Southern upbringing. Her work appears online in Mad Hatters’ Review, Poetry Repair Shop and Tattoo Highway. Her poem “An American Soldier” is in our Poems After the Attack anthology, and “Autumn” is in our Autumn Poems collection.

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