Village
The Creek Nation in their dream:
venison cooks under
old pines. The river bottom.
Cousins.
Chiefs with a memory
of migration. Here
was home as it had been.
Families. Laughing. The hawks.
Evenings.
All of it gone now
without a trace, hundreds
of years quiet. We all
will fall. Rome.
Even iron colored ghosts
gone from the valley
followed Line Creek down
the Flint, Apalachicola and the
Bay. They play.
Bathwater.
Poet, composer of music (Max Able / Abel, Rawls & Hayes), lawyer and spoken-word performer (Scapeweavel), L. Ward Abel lives in rural Georgia, and has been or will be published at The Reader (UK), The Yale Anglers’ Journal, Versal, The Pedestal, Pale House, Kritya, OpenWide, and many others. Abel has recently been nominated for “Best of the Web” by Dead Mule. He is the author of Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006) and the recently released The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008).