Come to Light : Contemporary Southern Poetry

MORGAN GRAY grew up in a small rivertown where gossip on a circular-dial party-line telephone and which allowed neighbors to eavesdrop on each others conversations and forward the "news" to Sunday prayer meetings composed of blue-haired widows reeking of Channel #5 family reunions, so-called worthy matrons, and just plain ole exaggerated, gossip by high-horse ladies full of prejudice, judgment, and better-than-thou tones. Absorbing all this folklore, Morgan felt compelled to evaluate and question morals that did not seem to define a sense of right or wrong, and good or evil.

As you read through Come to Light, you will feel poignant emotions, visualize stark, if not startling imagery, meet a variety of unique characters (some very good and some very evil), and be enlightened by timeless themes that will touch your lives, and perhaps even haunt your own identity.

Morgan Gray was delivered at birth in a two-story 1960's home by a self-trained, midwife grandmother, while a one-year older brother lay alongside the same bed where Morgan still sleeps in today. Living there till married at age nineteen in the living room witnessed by a large portrait of a sad-faced Jesus-no water turned to wine, there in the same house, Morgan's dad died in the same birth bed and several years later, Morgan's mom breathed her last breath in her favorite green-velvet rocking chair.

Morgan raised two girls in the same small town just a few blocks away from the homestead and still lives there today. Now a retired veteran English teacher of thirty years, Morgan has reached out to over 3,000 young high school adult-about-to-be's while, instilling in them a love for literature, and a freedom of expression as they too Come to Light.