On seeing a crow

On seeing a crow
Fall at least forty feet to his death,
Just like that,
Right in the middle of the boulevard,
With no warning, no flapping of wings,
Indeed, without a car in sight, either, 

The low morning Sun gaped:
He should have made
The scene more flamboyant,
But the rays were diffused
Into a soft, unending yellow ether,
Not pink, orange or red—
Jaundice, not passion for life
Or death.

How is it that the harbinger of death
Himself could fall?
Who gave the command to kill the messenger?
Death is not capricious;
Rather, he orchestrates with an eye towards greatness
As an artist and decomposer. 

Who can say?
Maybe the orders were mixed up.
Maybe the crow decided to disobey.

What We Are Left

The mud-spattered general
descended from his coach
onto devastated land,
at once halting the footfalls
behind him and instilling relief
from heart-pounding worry,
the tedium of corns and callouses 

This hot-air general
pulled his lids open wide,
smelt that the crust and grime
were different here, so
summoned a tinhorn page
with several squints at
the sagging low red sun 

Dipped his belly like a
divining rod at this night’s
camp, the flat among hills
topped with sheep in emaciated
languor without a shepherd 

Trudged ten more paces east,
nodded his bed there, then
grunted past weary salutes
and unblinking eyes,
closed his ears to clanging
shovels, flapping canvas,
the scrunge of gravel
kicked and crushed 

Stretched his neck for the major
to join him near a stream,
and there knelt to find flat stones
that whispered wish-wish-wish
as they skimmed the water’s surface 

Pulled the major to him
with unaccustomed tenderness,
cupped his shoulder,
but spoke only
to the rivulets:
“You know stones
are all we’ve got left.”

In Work a Kind of Peace

Shoeing at sundown, Mr. Carver
brings the hammer to bear.
“Bay-er,” he says or would say
if he gave to thoughts
the breath his grunts devour. 

At the ring of the last blow,
Porter-Boy shakes his mane.
Straw crunching quietly
beneath his new-shod hooves,
he’ll dream tomorrow’s furrows. 

Mrs. Carver mutters, milking still.
Her eye on the horizon
always finds the first cloud.
Ahead, both wife and husband
hope, awaits a dead, certain sleep. 

Yet even then their minds will work,
for work is the urge of everything here:
from the tick of the windmill
to the collie pups at play
to the worms about their business
beneath the boy’s grave.

Author’s Biography

John Joseph Ryan’s work has appeared in River Styx, McSweeney’s, and The Dark City (U.S.), and in international publications such as Mystery Magazine (Canada), Channel Magazine (Ireland), Grievous Bodily Harm (Australia), and A-Z of Horror (U.K.). He is the author of a best-selling crime novel, A Bullet Apiece (Amphorae Publishing Group, 2015), and he contributed a chapter on Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln’s relationship to the textbook Teaching Lincoln: Legacies and Classroom Strategies (Peter Lang, 2014). John hosts the YouTube series, "Creepy Poem of the Day," in St. Louis, Missouri, the heart of American promise and decline.