2 Poems

@ Gravity’s Cafe

The corner café sits on broken concrete
amid hoary overgrown brush
a reflection of solitary neglect.
Yet … …
the aging men with wooly white hair,
ragged beards and sagging wrinkles
shuffle in on a daily basis,
sip bitter black coffee,
and eat greasy biscuits
when "money is right,"
tell jokes with toothless grins,
await on tenterhooks
the next game of dominoes.
On occasion bluesy music
drifts languorously from a rear room,
Nostalgic rhythms create bleary memories
of what seems long ago.
Only here … … …
the old ones discarded by time keep counterpoised,
by the pinch effect of the timeworn café.

Amazing Gracie

Forsaken by a man
lost in the streets of despair,
Gracie lives with a loss of order.
Under crumbling ceilings
she watches helplessly
as young ones die before their time,
Thieves plunder the weak,
Death peddlers prey upon innocents,
Rats gnaw on asthenic babies,
Cockroaches devour spoils of the day.
From dreary depravity
a bitter discovery emerges,
the american dream … …
simply an uncapitalized illusion.
But amazingly,
Gracie survives!

Shirley Smith Wilbert is Professor of Library Science Emerita (from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh) now living and writing in Columbia, Missouri. She is a prize winning poet whose poems appear in literary magazines around and about the nation and the mid-west, including the Peninsula Pulse.