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Gary Whited is a poet, philosopher and psychotherapist. His first book titled, Having Listened, won the 2013 Homebound Publications Poetry Contest. In 2014 it received a Benjamin Franklin Silver Book Award, and in 2015 was translated into Russian and a bilingual edition was published.  His new book, Being, There, includes new poems along with his translation of the ancient Greek fragments of Parmenides from the 5th century BCE. This book dances between the poetic voice of Parmenides and the poetic remembrances of a young life on a prairie cattle ranch. His poems have appeared in journals, including Salamander, Plainsongs, The Aurorean, Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, The Wayfarer, Poetry Daily, The Red Letters and Kasparhauser.

Learning to Grieve

Gary Whited

It helps to remember old corral boards, rough to touch,
hanging by big nails, weathered, waiting for horses,

for cows or the too-young-to-help-in-the-field farmboy
carrying a whole day of time in his uncalloused hands.

Each board, once part of a pine tree growing on
a mountain’s side, tall and reaching, branches swaying

in wind, perch to sparrow or hawk. Can it remember
the axe and saw, the long fall, the broken limbs,

laying its full length onto the ground next by
its stump? Or the long ride to the mill, another saw,

big, noisy, severing its long body into well-
measured boards stacked with strangers, jostled on

and off trucks, stacked again and again until
the dusty farmer drives up with his truck,

picks this one and that one, stacks another bunch
of strangers, then the rough road to a new stack

by the barn? Again, the saw, this time shorter
by a foot or two, then the big nail, with its friend,

the hammer, digging deep. Then silence and stillness,
held fast in wind and sun. Nothing but cows and horses

passing, wearing smooth some rough places,
and the farmboy carrying his stack of time.

— Gary Whited

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