Suburban Colors a collection by vwatts Suburban Colors Soldiers Serenade

Suburban Colors The old house on the edge of the square Is painted green, dulled like wrapping paper Left out in the sun to fade Chipped and cracked, like the slab porch Which from sun and rain and cold and ice Has split, down the middle The kudzu has crept into the crack, bold and bright Dark green and living, shifting in the breeze of passing cars To wave, "hello, come see!" When it was new, that green paint probably raised a few eyebrows Now it soothes and speaks of warm summers And beckons you in, friendly. Hello. I have stories. Come sit on my porch. Mind the crack, now.

Soldiers* Onions are mounding in my back yard Fighting with the fescue, to be bigger and higher The onions are outnumbered, thin sentinels of pungent smell Every time the dogs trot over them Bending their not so rigid stalks The fescue is the miniature mountains of models That my brothers used to build in the front yard, for their tiny soldiers Acorns and stones as artillery,  fescue and moss mounds for cover To reenact Antietam or Bull Run or D-Day With a pie pan of water and no chaplains Beneath the fighting mounds of green, I wonder If there are other boys' soldiers, tiny plastic men Buried and forgotten, over and over, with no tiny white crosses to mark No memorials, and no one to remember The wars fought in my suburban backyard.

* Inspired by a poem my father wrote, years ago

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Serenade The geese are singing. They have voices meant for bawdy ballads and roadhouse rhymes. They fly like other people drink. Straight on and true, empty the glass and have another. Fly and land, fly and land. They are headed for the lake, where grass is like peanuts And the gravel crunches like shells on the floor They pick fights. With each other, over spilled beer and lost bits of clover Grazing the water's edge The happy-hour appetizers, set out over warmers with tiny plates and tongs There is no more 2-for-1 Only reduced prices and well drinks, a premium for the good stuff The geese don't know the difference And they jostle each other, waiting to catch the bartender's eye Only to scatter when someone new comes in. Forgetting the eggs in the nest, the kids with babysitter They'd rather sing. Karaoke makes them feel like stars, the louder the better The words make no sense. The geese talk in limericks, playing one-up with each other Until the wind shifts The spring is here and they are remembering they are geese Not partyers on a holiday. They'll head north soon, back to the land above, where they have to be polite But here, they are tourists And no one will remember them when they've gone But we'll miss the singing. Because the geese only sing in the spring, greeting the year With bawdy tales. The geese sound like angels, I think

all poems © 2004 v.a.watts