Featured Contributor ~ Poetry
Robert Funderburk was born by coal oil lamplight in a tin-roofed farmhouse outside Liberty, Mississippi. He moved to Baton Rouge, graduated from LSU, and now is a retired parole officer spending his time writing and enjoying a country home on fifty acres of wilderness with his wife, Barbara, in Olive Branch, Louisiana. Robert has had seventeen novels published, along with fifty poems and two short stories in various literary journals.
That Starry Friday
(Accepted by Poetry Quarterly, Winter 2021 Edition)
Beneath a purple dome
Pierced with lights
As I gazed at your eyes
More eloquent than
The tongue’s glib mutterings
An errant wind
Blew through my soul
Scraping sorrow’s ancient leaves
Across the tumbled stone
I could only imagine
What lay beneath
The dew-soft glimmering
Of your breast
A wall, stone and mortared strong
Or a music box
Filled with burnished memories
And crystal fears
Bereft of time’s consoling song
The Last 5 AM
Candle burning down,
smoke of a final cigarette
drifts toward the lost morning.
I rise for bed and, in total
surprise, leave an old
familiar sorrow. Companion
through countless vigils, he
yields to relentless exorcism
of the years.
To sleep at last in darkness,
the past no more than smoke,
will sustain this interval
of life into life.