Bryan Helton | Angelo Road: A Poem @behelton | Uploaded September 2024 | Updated October 2024, 14 seconds ago.
This is a reading of Angelo Road, a poem looking back to the long summers of childhood spent at my grandparents home. The poem is included in my collection, The Manic Joy of the Dead.

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Angelo Road

stand once more in the gravel drive
see green gush of light
raise golden dome
lost home
stranded among oaks
what that year when you left this alive?

summer of light's elysium
hole of heaven where
the bright comes in
lost shine
of pastlife so strike
the leaning barn to out and hum

the dead may dwell in leaf stone skies
as honeysuckles
say our summer
is here
initials engraved
creak and swing and the see-saw rise

cicadas guiro where the departed played
the bird under brick
look next summer
in cage
yellow-green he sang
tell the story how the bones have stayed

stay summer and pass peach of sun
eaten and it’s pit
dropped in that grave
gone westward
it lit all the life
you could not save and time is what’s done

what things grieving roam this way?
midnight the night shrieks
and laughs to fright
tells joy
of fear so given
stands delight and comes into day

birds yearn ecstatic sounds in black
at five dark six day-
burst at seven
but when
acorns and their heads
come falling what of grin to lack?

how burst of greenlight in face?
Where mind to matter
the moss? But step back
and close
the book - here is world
now in passing and is your only place