Rachel Caruso-Bryant

Rachel Caruso-Bryant is from Florida and is now an English language lecturer at a university in Saudi Arabia. She lives with her husband and cats and travels the world whenever she gets the chance. She enjoys writing about cultural identities and displacement, her experiences abroad, and what it means to be a woman of the world. She misses the smell and sound of rain storms terribly. Her poems have appeared in the Red Eft Review, The Stark Poetry Journal, Rat’s Ass Review, Gambling the Aisle, The Skinny Poetry Journal, A Lonely Riot, Gravel, and more.

 

 

 

 

The Gravity of Yeats

‘Cast a cold Eye

          On Life, on Death.

          Horeseman, pass by!’

                   –WB Yeats

The café next to Yeats’s grave is full.

Every single flowered teapot

is piping hot with Irish Breakfast Tea.

Cups and saucers clink like

champagne glasses on New Year’s Eve.

Weathered patrons laugh until they cough.

Scone crumbs fly from their mouths

as they spit out an anecdote that cannot wait.

Full of tea and jam, they head outside,

wooly bundles Vaselined like

January school children.

They move in slow clusters,

stepping with thoughtful precision,

sticks tapping out paths to

Yeats’s resting place amongst the stones.

They smile toothless grins that

only a grandchild could love

as they take photos above the poet’s bones.

“Horseman pass by!” they whisper.

Then they hike the last leg back to the awaiting coach.

Their bodies baggy, they climb and sit and breathe.

Another coach pulls in.

The café next to Yeats’s grave is full.

 

© 2018 Rachel Caruso-Bryant