From South Mississippi
        (January, 2006)

Skies are gray today, tepid
January. Down the short hill
where I walk every winter here
the greenest rye grass usually grows.
Deer who are feasting see me if I appear
late evenings or early at sunrise. So
today I descend, expect the same pasture
and fish pond.

But the whole hamlet, it seems, has been recast.
This field is now full of dead, uprooted oaks
someone burned here as trash. Stumps smoke.
This year I find only ash and waste. Beyond, brown
buck may hide and stare from deep
in pines that the August storm left,
but I cannot see them. On my trek
past dry and rotting debris
of vines and brush piled high from Katrina,
one crimson cardinal against all the rest -- then

that shock of pure black.

- Langdon Review of the Arts / Labyrinth