GOLF-COURSE 1, NATURE 0

On barrier islands, golf courses march like armies.
Random greenness falls before its more civilized eighteen-hole cousin.
In these demanding times, you can't hit enough little white balls.
Spare the forest and spoil the heart is the prevailing wisdom.

There has to be a limit to getting away from it all.
Drain the swamps, raze the herons,
bulldoze the cypress, the palmettos,
push the Gullah to the tip of paradise.

Developers sit back on clubhouse verandas,
admire the battlefield, heads nodding like geese.

Our guide says, sometimes the 'gators invade the golf courses
and if you can't budge them, they have to be shot.
The word "invade" slips from his tongue as easily
as a gloved hand reaching for a nine iron.

OUR BITES

Your leg never did recover
from when the dog bit you.
In your email, you describe
what it means to hobble rather than walk.
You add, send me some of your verse
to cheer me up.
I start to do it with all good intentions
but show me a poem yet
where there isn't an aggressor
bursting from its lines
as ferocious and snarly
as that brute dog.
Show me one where something as fragile,
vulnerable as a leg
doesn't suffer at least one
bloody fierce bite.
No matter what I wrote,
it'd be that dog baring its teeth,
threatening you from the page.
So, I won’t be sending you a poem.
It could only be about me
and everything that ever had
its fangs taking chunks
out of my ankle.
I’m the victim of many a mongrel and cur.
I also hobble through life

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Rathalla Review. Latest books, “Covert” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.