No One Knows It’s Sunday

The cattle don’t know it’s Sunday

but silence brings an eerie peace.

Uphill, stiff backs, a chill to Saturday’s

sunburn, the scratch of alfalfa hay

pulled from the top loft each bale

brushing against its neighbor

a sweet music. The highway lining

the western field remains silent.

A father dropping bales over the fence

while the sun struggles to reach

the treetops and the son struggles

to wake. The mother pours coffee

watches her man through the kitchen

window trekking up gravel and red

clay toward the woodpile. There’s

a log or two to split for fire, sausage

to make, spoon drop biscuits –

this is the day off, the morning of quiet --

there's a knowledge in the release

of knotted muscle in the back, the icy

chill of a sunburn against a morning

breeze, the tension in hands turning

the pages of the Sunday paper.

The beasts, the skin, the stomach

the highway – no one else --

no one knows it’s Sunday.

D.A. Gray’s poetry collection, Contested Terrain, was published by FutureCycle Press in October 2017.  His work has appeared in The Sewanee Review, Appalachian Heritage, Rattle: Poets Respond, Syntax & Salt, and Rise Up Review among many other journals.  Gray holds an MFA from The Sewanee School of Letters and an MS from Texas A&M-Central Texas. Retired soldier and veteran, the author writes, teaches and lives in Central Texas.