Afternoon Commute
Awakening moonflower vines
and dreamy honeysuckle
caress the grill and hood of a rusted pickup
in a field along the highway that leads me home.
They blanket its dents and fading paint
with their sweet and heady scent
as bees and traffic hum.
I see its owner take one final glance
at windows left forever down
and sniff the dark familiar smell
of valves through faithful duty bruised to uselessness,
before turning away. I see a hand
give a last salute
the way a sculptor says farewell to stone.
Some afternoons strangers pause with me,
to honor this roadside embrace
of nature and product of man, and seek
another peaceful place,
maybe just beyond the curve ahead,
where we might leave our own roadside gifts
for a new day’s travelers,
all wrapped and ribboned for them
in the arms of moonflower and honeysuckle.
Jerry Krajnak is a former altar boy and a Vietnam veteran who is now retired in the sleepy North Carolina mountains after forty-plus years of teaching. Recent poems appear in Plants and Poetry, Novus, Rat’s Ass Review and Flee to Spring, a Wingless Dreamer anthology.