Roy Roberts
About Roy
I have been paid for a variety of undertakings during my curious safaris into the brambles. My parents and I farmed. I drove truck and did odd jobs for a lumber yard – including cutting glass and grass. I have been a preacher, a pastor, an English teacher of high school students, an adjunct professor of philosophy and medical ethics. For the past nine years, my wife and I have worked our produce farm on the land where I grew up. The one constant braided through every endeavor has been my ache to write. It pushes, fusses with, and entices me. It fidgets with drumming fingers and tapping feet, fizzing incessantly: “Try to dig up and ship out what you have sifted during your mountain summits, your ragged tumbles down gravel slopes, your struggles to regain footing.”
All of this is the meat and bone of my poems – and essays. I invite you to join my pursuit. My first book, Wrestling Thunderbolts, is available on Amazon (search Wrestling Thunderbolts Roberts). My second book, Tree Line, should be ready for release in early 2025.
The Resistance
When the flood gates are still open, wide open,
but the pond begins to clear its throat,
coughing from time to time on tired topsoil,
beaver-dammed by covert agents
the calendar
the where-did-I-put-that
the out-of-breath stair steps
the subtle drag of a foot
About now, a teacher grins a class quiet
and asks a question that unzips curiosity,
unshackles startling possibilities
minds clamber into cockpits,
wheel chocks yanked,
staccato radio chatter
chanting along with keyboards
You were there!
You know you were!
Check the dash cam footage!
It is still recording! Still! Still!
To see clouded eyes spark with midnight lightning,
salvos of “yes” and “go” and “do” and “why not”
plunging “not-good-enough” into its coffin,
this puts breath to voice, puts voice to song,
rich, full-throated song!!!
To soak the next page with ink, with pregnant ink,
the twang of a new arrow launched from its string!
