Enough
by N.S. Yancey
If there is still time left to learn to love
and live, if not to ease my burdened heart,
when dawn comes again, soft with mourning-dove
calls out beyond the tree-line, crowned with rest,
that last night raked with storm-sweet fingers of
June wanderlust – drives me like waves to start
that dusk-ward road again – can it be enough,
tossed, torn, all said, all done, to call it blessed?
But you have places yet you need to be.
See, I’ve been many men since last we met,
and, ambling on like this, how I forget:
the road is hard enough for careworn feet.
So, should my overwrought tongue us assail,
hush me up, that a better word prevail.
—
N. S. Yancey is a lifelong lover of art in multiple media, from the vibrant surrealism of Octavio Paz to the spaghetti-western-in-space that is Cowboy Bebop, from the Eleven tongues of Middle Earth to the flannel-flanked croonings of Pearl Jam, Yancey is as inevitable a product of his 90’s nerdy-kid upbringing as he is determined not to pay any of it the disservice of attempted and failed imitation. Having finished graduate school at Princeton Theological Seminary and a chaplain residency in Des Moines, Yancey can now be found barreling over the backroads between Highway 30 and Interstate 80 in his blue Crown Vic, raising the blood pressure of every local he tails on his way to another appointment with a dying patient. A Cedar Rapids native, Yancey lives in Marshalltown with his partner Scott, dog Cleopetra, and cat Calpurnia.