Evan Stephens
Three Poems
Carrying On
Soon, the bars will all close.
Soon, the restaurants will empty.
Yet this wild archery lawn,
these elephant bones,
this wild strawberry tree,
these rose benches where
we ate our bread and wine—
they will carry on.
Ten days green
in the quarantine,
as the numbers
combed upwards,
always upwards,
enough to make one
invoke Jeffers.
Sitting beside you
at spring tide
at Sandymount—
the sea will carry on.
The canal face,
blushed with swan,
it, too, will carry on.
And now you and I,
on the sunken patio,
in ruined deck chairs
sitting and watching
the sun splash in—
carrying on.
A Low
Things between us
have reached such a low
that I’m drunk at noon
on a Wednesday in October.
But what if I grabbed the sun
for you, shaking it free
from lacy palms of cloud,
and gave it to your greenness?
Would it be enough to fix it?
Or are all these drams
of Scotch just turning out
dreams in the early afternoon?
Little Rainings
The broken symmetries
of the night…
you move,
I move.
You were in the green hill,
chatting with clouds;
I kept a bar open,
wrote you a ditty.
There are little rainings
everywhere tonight.
They slip down into the graves
across the street. It sets the mood.
But I need to get out,
walk the block,
shake this umbilical glass,
join a blind fog.
The moon threatens
to escape its sweater
of noctilucent cloud,
but we’re not looking.
—Submitted on 12/29/2020
Evan Stephens holds a BA from the University of Maryland College Park, and a JD from the Columbus School of Law. An attorney, he splits his time between Washington, DC, and Dublin.
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