Four Lights

By D.A. Gray

The focus on the yellow sign, dwarfing its black
letters, allows us to move on – to return
to our regularly programmed night of silence.

For a day the gold box burns in the mind,
the darker letters WAFFLE HOUSE hang
like ash. A tragedy happened, someone says,

then turns the channel. The focus on a shooter’s
mental health lets us grieve for the sorry
state of things. We can’t even say it – murderer.

We let the rain soaked streets of Nashville
carry the grief down, leaving us our silence.
Gather enough silence and we, whose angst

drowns the mother, the father weeping
on the screen, can cover ourselves. Gather enough
silence and a city can bleach itself great again.

No one wants to see the faces and each alone
in silence find an image, a gold sign whose black
letters have cooled. Still something burned once.

It’s the eyes that interrupt the silence
cherished more than the heaving chest
witnessed with the sound turned down.

We who’ve never felt the rush of air
through a hole in our sides, stand quietly
beneath the fanned leaves of a maple tree

relishing the fact it holds back the rain.
It is the silence of a lone wolf hiding, quieter
than the star, the worker, the athlete, the artist.

We belong to the silence that keeps prejudice
hidden in the darkness of letters, behind a gilded
sign, hiding from the imagination

in a place, someone might say, terror lives.

D.A. Gray’s poetry collection, Contested Terrain, was recently released by FutureCycle Press. His previous collection, Overwatch, was published by Grey Sparrow Press in 2011. His work has appeared in The Sewanee Review, Appalachian Heritage, The Good Men Project, Writers Resist, and Literature and the Arts, among many other journals. Gray holds an MFA from The Sewanee School of Letters and an MS from Texas A&M-Central Texas. Retired soldier and veteran, the author writes and lives in Central Texas.

Photo credit: bradhoc via a Creative Commons license.