Devery Landrum

Fields of Heaven

If i have, may have, flown this earth un-woke
just ‘cause I quite learned how not to dream dreams
or if I didn’t seek stars riding moonbeams
i would have heard your machines as they spoke.
maybe, if my eyes listened to song of trees
i might have understood your will to kill 
with gun and blade, you slash and burn with skill.
there’s no haven from your death and disease
but I’ll take my feathers to soar blue heights
with pelts, ivory and an olive branch under wing
we’ll dream of Elysium and the glory it brings
and pray the Goddess bless the fields with sacred rites. 

your style and hubris you’ve always inflated
compared to the love and beauty She created.


Why he ever

why Pop’s ever came to love those Lincoln
continentals, reason can’t surmise.
keepin’ with the Jones’ kept Pops mesmerized
to be cool and hip for folks, warped his thinkin’.
Pop’s legacy with those stinkin’ Lincoln
continentals parade dreams, life compromised
with whitewall rims and droptops, bank-rolled demise
of a manchild who lived for cars, girls and drinkin’.
hundred proof bottles of brown liquor,
gave Pop’s courage to be king over his domain.
I never thought I’d cry once he was dead
‘cause between drink and cars, he beat on us quicker,
if we begged for a dime or eyes complained,
yet amidst hateful tears, I felt love unsaid.

Devery Landrum has worked as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker specializing working
with children and adolescents for over twenty years.  He has been writing poetry
since he was in high school and has had poems in The San Fernando Journal, Blindman’s Rainbow, Writer’s Cramp, Sounds of Poetry, The Sunday Suitor Poetry Review, Lucid Moon, and the Society of American Poets.  He is a member of The Writers Center in Bethesda MD.