It is some time since I have been
to what it was had once turned me backwards.       
Robert Creeley

A hill, warm in the sun,
crumbled black frost-heaves
redolent not yet of rot,

iron-tang under the pale
winter sun – each thing
requires burial, ritual,

coat flung on the barrow
the shovel-point makes conical.
Sidling round the little hill,

kicking it flat, charging the salient
with the leaden regiment
in the chessmen’s box

will not will not  will not –
nevertheless, forsythia soon
will bud, wisteria whiten,

willow help hush the clatter—
all the pastoral horror,
all the Romantic blather. 

John Repp’s poems have appeared in two previous issues of Poetrybay. The two newest of his fifteen collections of poetry are chapbooks forthcoming later in 2019: Madeleine Wolfe—A Sequence (Seven Kitchens Press) and Cold-Running Current (Alice Greene & Co.).