Poem of the Day: “Leaving Alone” by Chrystal Berche

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present “Leaving Alone” by Chrystal Berche.  Chrystal Berche writes.  She writes about hard times and troubled times.  The lives of her characters are never easy, but then what life is?  For her, the story is in the struggle, the journey, the triumphs and the falls. She writes about artists, musicians, loners, drifters, dreamers, hippies, bikers, truckers, hunters, and all the other things she knows and loves. Sometimes she writes urban romance, and sometimes it’s aliens crash landing near a roadside bar. When she isn’t writing, she’s taking pictures or curled up with a good book and a kitty on her lap.  

Leaving Alone

Chrystal Berche 

I wait for you

When the black leather seats of the diner

Are no longer plush

And stuffing oozes

Like mashed potatoes

From broken stitching

Cracked

Faded

Like the rearview

I watch for you in

Walking

Through fields of blooming clover

Thumb out

Waiting

For the aged silver bus

Painted in flowers

To ride on by

And me

In beads and braids

Hanging out the window

Mellow and warm

Swaying

To old freedom songs

Lost

Now

In the pounding rhythm of a country

So far removed

From all that is holy

It has forgotten

The blood

The magic

The sex

Spilled and leaked

On the old highways

That forged America

And pumped life

Into withered veins

Pain

And agony

Torture

In restriction

The loss

Of what made us gods

Haunting

The American nights

Where Jazz is dead

And blues are the swirling neon

Of too many bars

All pressed together

In tiny rows

Huddled

Pretending there is nothing wrong

With a place

That says come in empty

And leave alone.

Poet’s Notes:  “Leaving Alone” was penned during a drive down the East Coast that began in Massachusetts and ended in Tennessee. Along the way I encountered an old diner and the remains of a burned out hippy bus and I started to wonder what the country must have seemed like in seventies, while my dad was hitching coast to coast and meeting all kinds of people. As I sat having breakfast in the weathered diner, looking at the people there, wondering what their stories were, if they had experiences like my father had on the road, the poem began to come together as I imagined someone waiting for a lover, or a friend who never came through those parts again, the changes they must have witnessed, the memories they must have had, and the disappointment of knowing that time was over.  

Editor’s Note:  I was captivated by the short, staccato stanzas, narrative style, and haunting imagery of this poem.  “Leaving Alone” was first published in the August 2014 issue of Songs of Eretz Poetry E-zine.