Poetry: Selections from Frea Wooten

That Futile Thunder Echoes

Living years in the mountains 

have been like crashing waves 

trying to expand

 

That futile thunder echoes 

again and again 

The rippling water is tussled

 

Dusty fragments fall with each push

giving a hint of possible surrender

 

It’s a useless combat though,

the death 

going on inside of its body

 

The ammo; an unyielding homily 

to hold its chaos between the cliffs

 

Disturbance flows deep red 

Boiling like a bitter toxin in a pot

 

Yet, the battle continues

The only victor is the eyes 

which blindly witness such a storm

 

How it slowly tears down the rock

until the cliffs collapse, or the water 

stills

 

and the war zone goes quiet

because there’s no way out 

when the radiant sky and bottom

of the canyon are so far apart

 

the flipping wave becomes a divider

between the elevation and the shallows

It’s how anxiety manages to linger

flooding the bone, thriving in the marrow and hammering the lungs

Stone barriers control the body

as it gets battered by efforts 

drawn from hope

 

That futile thunder echoes

Again and again

The rippling water is tussled

Echoes that Never Cease

Life used to be more than anxieties.

I wish I could rewind time, just go back

 

They say that history repeats itself.

People claim, nothing’s new beneath the sun.

 

Nothing is new. Not love, crime, death, or pain.

Not rainbows that dive behind clouds and haze

 

Not even upside down rain can be made fresh.

It just waits somewhere in folds of twilight

 

I’ve read oaths to balloons in poetry

And lived long enough to watch things replay

 

I’ve witnessed senseless shootings and wildfires

They spread out like plagues and just kept coming

 

I hear talk about wars, even zombies

Said to be products of a lost nations

 

I hear and see stranger things by the day

Like weather claiming life across the world

 

No wonder we live more like caged birds now

Society crumbles more as it breaths

 

I recall when Mother left doors open

Her biggest concern was ironing shirts

 

I would disappear into neighborhoods

Rode my bike for hours with no worries

 

I wish only the good things repeated

Not the things that break us into pieces

 

But rainbows will dive behind clouds and haze

Doors will lock and history will replay

 

I keep thirsting for inspiration too

Not things borrowed, or blue as if that’s luck

 

I sit on my deck repeating this too,

Life used to be more than anxieties…

Frea Wooten is an Appallachian writer living in the Virginia mountains. Nature and every day living inspires her work.