Poems by Gregory Lobas

Compassion for Crows

by Gregory Lobas

From Canary Spring 2022

Greg started out on the North Coast area of the Great Lakes but has since migrated to the foothills of western North Carolina in the First Peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

They fly by the murder like tatters of midnight
swearing oaths against the daylight
they cannot restrain and so they complain,
dark sentinels across the dry fields of a shared futility.

I know a woman named Talks-to-Crows.
From the forest floor she stutters their same
coarse-throated caw-caws calling crows from the fields
to wheel above the treetops frantic to find
their crow-calling mother.
Crows she smiles, just like to be noticed.

God notices.
God sees everything. God sees
one crow standing silent and alone in my drive
at the bottom of the hill, near the trees, around the bend,
set upon the gravel like a bust of Socrates.
God sees me stop my victory-red pickup
the size of 10,000 crows, sees us lock our eyes, the crow
refusing to fly or hop aside like a proper crow should.

Black.
Crow-black.
Beak-black
feet-black
eye-black
obsidian brilliance
probing the depth-black
of my compassion for crows.

It waits, and I feel the prick of its dour expectation.
Should I get out of my truck and wait with it?
But God sees me ease my tire blacks
around the crow, black between,
undeterred from the press of errands
black of no consequence.
God sees the crow raise its black countenance
to my undercarriage black passing over,
the crow dwindling into the nothing of my rear-view mirror.

The absence of a crow follows me to town,
to the hardware store for nails, the grocery for bread.
I fill up with its absence at the gas station.

An empty hour later, my tires crunch the gravel
of my drive. and I find it could wait no longer, for crows
may fly by the murder, but they die alone.
Only with its death do I begin to see as God sees,
carnation, emerald, lavender,
feathers like shimmering flowers
limp and iridescent
on the stone of my driveway.

God sees me wonder if God could be a crow.
Would I have waited an hour even so?

God sees every crow.
But I, late, have come

to see this one.

© Gregory Lobas

White Irisette*

by Gregory Lobas

From Canary Spring 2024

They say we need more energy
here, that our pace will not keep up
with the pace of things to come,
that we will wither on the vine
if they don’t pluck the fiddle from the rivers,
the flute from the peaks,
the azure from these wild mountains
and stitch them up with towers and cables
like a suckling pig for roasting.
I pin my hopes on root hairs
needling through this red dirt
hard as the iron will
of bottom-line thinkers
pale green wisps,
slender brocade
trumpeting
its tiny victory.
Search the edges
of your existence,
the forgotten corners
of accumulation
where trifling things
repose. If you’re lucky
you may find it,
resilient,
composed,
here in light,
there in shadow,
like a slip of movement
at the corner of your eye.
But it hasn’t moved.
It has nestled
there all along,
between the things
you take and the things
you take for granted,
and you wonder
how on earth it got there,
how it managed
to escape your notice.

*The White Irisette is a federally-listed endangered species
of flower which occurs only in four counties
of western North and South Carolina

Yatu Moon

Curacao

by Gregory Lobas

From Canary Spring 2022

I sit on the veranda
light a cigar,
close one eye
and sight-in the rising moon
with a cactus flower.
I don’t know why I do it.
A symmetry, I suppose,
to hold the line-of-sight just so,
and view the flower-colored
moon drenching the yatu’s
moon-colored flower.
How to endure the limestone
rubble of our lives:
Be a cactus.
Grow shocking
spiny florets, skin
impenetrable
to trade winds.
Labor a full year
to produce this one
pure elegance
in spite of it all.
Many things live tonight
that will not live again.
I will not be the same
tomorrow, and this
flower will,
by morning,
be wilted and chewed
by an iguana like a cud,
its one night of splendor
a dark blot in the detritus
beneath the furnace
pillars of the yatu landscape.