2 poems by poet Glynn Monroe Irby

Glynn Monroe Irby has been a featured poet at previous FPL Poetry Series readings. He has been published in both the Houston and Austin poetry festival anthologies as well as Sol Magazine, Borderlands, Texas Poetry Review, and numerous others; Irby has been an invited poet to many reading venues in Texas, is a member of the Galveston Poets’ Roundtable, the Circle Way Poets, the Poetry Society of Texas, the Gulf Coast Poets, and was selected in 2006 as one of the “Bards of the Bayou.”

  

Picking Figs Before the Birds Come 

When blue northers came hard,

grafted fig limbs silently trembled.

I placed blankets across their crown

and fire barrels nearby.

Before spring rains came washing

through forest underbrush, I nourished

the first-year striplings, dispersed

phosphates on the ground.

While formless birds thrash

inside the hurricane fence line,

midday shadows have become short.

With promise of abundance,

I pick fruit from each offshoot

you collect in a sycamore basket,

I trust the word

of trees,

honor the voice

of harvest.

Glynn Monroe Irby

Geophysical Survey

Leather men move quietly through buttercups  

setting fuses into shot holes

drilled above the sulfur in the salt ridge

where charcoal timbers of previous egos

have fallen under the experiential plane

and columns of arcane memories

are cracked into lines along the spinal tracks

of shadow trains.

These rust-encrusted pipe-heads

once thrust into the brimstone blood heart,

spilling crimson onto the shallow bed

before condensing into these soft sun stones

that litter the wrinkled skin

and blend with the glaze of broken silica.

Explosions rattle contours of crow-footed gullies

and echo image the acoustical outline

of resources layered within my personality,

redefining my value by the simple motion

of a red pen pushing across the parchment

of my comprehension.

Glynn Monroe Irby