Garnets

I dug up garnets west of Chatham.
They stared like blood ruby eyes
across a tobacco field, a weedy ditch.
They felt like burnt, swollen pennies.
I hid them all summer in a big clam shell.

I gave them to a cousin one night.
He grinned and said, sew a dark cloth
around them, bag them up like heaven.
He grinned all year, his luck much slower
than fifty two Vegas card tricks and math.

This was just when Vietnam
touched my cousin, and drafted him.
It dusted Chatham across the sky.
It fleeced his mind like gamblers
loading bullets behind all their cards.
He never came home. Last year I found
the cloth with the garnets sewed in,
and I sold it cheap at a flea market,
one more thing with no more war.

Author of the article

Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, Virginia, with his wife Kendall and their son Alan. They have an art studio called Towhee Hill in their home. He is a founding member of Blue Ridge Discovery Center, an environmental education organization with programs in Virginia and North Carolina. He is also a regional editor for Virginia Birds, a publication of the Virginia Society of Ornithology. He has published poems in many magazines, most recently in Still: The Journal, Town Creek Review, Apeiron Review, Decades Review, and San Pedro River Review.