Poems of Hope Contest: Ozarkian Seasons, Ethan McGuire

Ethan McGuire is a healthcare cybersecurity professional and a writer of essays, fiction, poetry, reviews, and translations who lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana with his wife and their two children. He last appeared in PFPOI in September 2024 Couplets Contest, with  his poem Old Gods.

Ozarkian Seasons

I

Deciduous blossoms, heat breezes,

drifting leaves, white water dreams:

Hope will never fail.

 II

Lumbering storm clouds

rest palms of rain on the earth—

nature breathes anew.

 

Blistering summer—

withering vacationers—

praying for Winter.

 

A cat’s patter wind

in shrugging, paint-splashed treetops:

Death’s beauty in leaves.

 

Frost makes fields brittle;

crystal ice coats dying trees.

Red cardinals sing.

 

III

A wrinkling mirror—

grass, dirt, and sky reflected—

I pray to God there.

 

Hunting Spencer Creek—

cliffs, red clay, coral fossils—

awed, I lost my gun.

 

Dilapidated

oak rife with pocks, splinters, tears:

If only you spoke.

 

Beneath sky valleys,

more slowly moving, flowing,

come mountains of earth.

 

IV

Dogwoods bloom, blackberries ripen,

acorns fall, snow fills hollows:

Hope—in phases—persists.