Ninety-five Junes
and the red clay
still knows your name.
Georgia took you back
the way it takes everything —
slow, patient,
warm in the palm.
In the kitchen
the biscuits are rising
without you.
Faith is small again,
flour on her chin,
and you are chasing her
past the screen door
into a light
that has not yet
learned how to leave.
Maters on the sill.
A pot of beans
murmuring to itself
all afternoon
like a woman
half in prayer.
You taught me
that this is prayer.
Daddy and the moonshine,
the jar held up
to a kerosene sun —
how he laughed,
how the laugh
stayed in the wood
of the house
for years afterward.
How yours did too.
How it does.
The shop on the corner.
Tom’s, and then yours —
The Jett Sett —
thirty-five years
of women rising
from the chair
a little more
themselves.
You touched their heads
the way the preacher
touched water:
gently,
and meaning it.
Three million little books
slipping into hands
on the other side
of the world.
John, chapter one.
In the beginning.
You knew
where the beginning was.
You sent it
in envelopes.
Bells. Angels.
A garden
that forgave you
every spring.
Two husbands
gone on ahead
to set the table.
Three daughters
already there,
waiting at the door
the way you waited
for them
to come home from school.
And Linda —
Linda who has never
been alone,
not for a single
hour of her life,
because you were there,
and now
the others are there,
the way a house
keeps standing
when one beam
is taken
because every other beam
remembers
how to hold.
She will not be alone.
You made certain of that
the way you made
certain of everything —
quietly,
across decades,
without once
calling it love
because you were
too busy
doing it.
And somewhere
a girl is dancing —
hips, scarves,
a borrowed brass coin
catching the lamp —
and she is you,
and she is laughing,
and the laugh
is the same one
that rang through
every room
you ever blessed
by walking into.
Sara,
the clay is red,
the biscuits are warm,
the river is close.
Go on.
We will find you
in the small things —
a bell,
a bean,
the wing
of an angel
left on a windowsill
that we did not put there.
The trees lean as they will—
left, right, or somewhere in the middle.
The are rooted deep, casting honest shadows,
quiet, patiently growing this way and that;
together making a forest
more beautiful by their differences.
The creek hurries forward,
cutting through without permission,
clutching every fallen scrap—
a leaf, a stone,
the smallest rumor of soil.
It knows only the truth it gathers around itself,
its surface bright with conviction,
blind beyond its own course.
Above, the sky endures—
it has watched storms trade hands,
knows the trees for what they are,
knows the restless babbling of water,
and remains slow to judge,
as many are—those wise and open skies,
older than the arguments below.
The corn was a city of dry, golden bones, standing coldly
as daylight bled out like a fresh wound on the leaking horizon.
I walked in, the path closing behind me like an old faint scar
and then I heard it, a whisper, the sound of molded silk tearing,
an ominous muttering among the papery battle banners,
and it was then that I became fully aware, something paced me,
keeping just beyond my sight, footsteps rustling like turning pages,
and I was the trespasser in a library of decay, suddenly
I was the story, food for the lost souls hungry to read.
(for Lt. Col. Boyd D. “Buzz” Wagner)
It must have felt strange, letting the world fall from your hands—
that first skyward yaw pulling the wheels from the ground,
Johnstown shrinking to hills and smokestacks below,
and the wide sky, waiting with arms outstretched.
You were a boy with steel wings and quiet eyes,
flung far from home, drawing fire in churning skies,
and through that hellish heaven above,
eight names fell behind your streaking shadow—
planes broken and folded into silence,
your guns unstitching their borrowed air.
They called you the first ace—
because we saw who you really were,
the first to rise and not come back the same.
A poet once wrote, something does not love a wall,
and the sky is no different. The impossible
weight of metal surrendered to the wind,
pulling glory from the sky, the same weight
that breaks all our heroes.
And in the January cold, when you came home to Johnstown,
the town surged forward, and stood still for you,
twenty thousand strong,
lining the winter streets in silence and frozen breath.
Still, we carry your memory like a warm flame,
and lest we forget, it is etched in Grandview stone.
Even the sky remembers with each passing breeze—
airy whispers drifting over your grave.
And when we pass by and read your name,
we pause and glance once more toward the sky—
our hearts pulled upward, as if we might leave the ground
to feel what it meant to rise and not come back the same.
©Glenn Lyvers 2025
(“Buzz” is buried in Grandview Cemetery, Johnstown, PA)
