L. Ward Abel’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals (Rattle, Versal, The Reader, Pacific Review, Worcester Review, Main Street Rag, others), and he is the author of four full collections and eleven chapbooks of poetry, including Green Shoulders—New and Selected Poems 2003–2023 (Silver Bow, 2023), and The Teller’s Road (Bottlecap, 2025). He is a retired lawyer and teacher of literature, he writes and plays music, and lives in rural Georgia.

Tempted to Believe the Peace

The wide way down
to open fields
shines
on a last ridgeline
beyond leveling hills and
a slight slope
where the water
is slow.

A covered bridge
over Red Oak Creek, I think,
makes a gravel road with clay.
Shadows pass above
my car—
no names for those wings,
silhouetted,
their sources unseen.

The fields have become
overgrazed,
clipped close to ground,
old cow-flowers, yellow
dusty, pocked—
centuried into a fully lit
quiet pale green.

Here, I am alone.
No cars behind or in front.
Nearby, great shoals ready
their fall down to the gulf
calling
with a raspy voice.

One would be tempted
to believe
the peace.

Late Symphonies

I am the breeze that makes
branches fall in the woods,
just listen to them fall.

I am the ground receiving them
and I’m a statuette of a saint or a
soldier from some lost cause
who leans-in beside the path
just the same.

I am the flocks
circling drains of october
no one could call it singing
but the notes in four/four
three/four, six/eight—
crazy acadian
horns.

I am the nest provided
to me first
and then shepherded
by me to others
along the way and

I am one of the late symphonies:
less acclaimed
less studied.

Last Year’s Catch

Down that now-old road some of which hovers
over turquoise, it was Edward G Robinson and
Claire Trevor in the steam of lower latitudes
who, in silvery black and white chrome
where the film moves over light and clicks
from push button switches and air cooled
rooms with sea wind,
received
their only relief when drinking songs full of pity
and hurricanes without given names rolled like
time-before-time over shallow warmth with carib
accents gone from pox and gold and misplaced
trust, while John Huston was in another room
made from cigar smoke and rum and last year’s catch
recalling oxygen tanks and tubes and James Joyce and
Key Largo and starter homes
built on sand.