Riding The Poetry Bus with People Who Don't Like This?

I have not been on TFE's Poetry Bus for some time now and have missed some amazing prompts, but I have a boarding pass for a ride driven this week by NanU. Here's what NanU asks of Poetry Bus passengers:

The theme at hand is something you like that other people don’t like. Or you’re afraid they don’t like it. Or you think they think you’re strange for liking it.

Reconcile the past, bank on the future

There are programs to do this for me
and I could use the bank's website to
monitor the account. But on account of
a peculiar night long ago, when a sort
of imprinting transpired, I find pleasure
reconciling the month's records alone
at my desk late at night. Just the way
he showed me.

My week in northern California with
my aunt, my uncle, and their kids -
my cousins younger than I at nine -
had been a swimmingly sunny time
but on the final night my uncle woke me,
had me follow him to their large bedroom
where against the bay window he had
his desk, folding table, and files in his
makeshift first home office.
(They were so young themselves
then, just starting out, and had not yet
moved to the big house where they  
all grew up).

My aunt snored lightly in their bed
across the room. The light he set on
the folding table had a short beam from
bulb to bank statement and stack of
checks. He whispered that he wanted
to teach me how to work with these things,
to make sense of them, to have no fear
of them, so I would not grow up incapable
of caring for myself like his "sweetie" --
and he smiled into the dark toward
her blond hair.

MLydiaM ~ January 2011

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. . . shall be scrap and rust

 Limited from Chicago Poems (1916)
         ~by Carl Sandburg

    I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
          of the nation.
    Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
          go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
    (All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
          and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
          pass to ashes.)
    I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
          answers: "Omaha."


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crack - adjective
INFORMAL. excelling in skill or performance; first-rate: a crack shot, crack troops

________________

This is another of the photographs taken by my uncle, James H. Swearingen, in 1923 on the "family transcontinental trip by auto."  Please come back for an upcoming post featuring a Fourth of July piece from Uncle Jim's memories recorded on tape in 1982.

He sure was something special and I'm grateful I had more than a few opportunities to spend time with him before he passed to ashes . . .







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Horses, past and future?

The Horses by Edwin Muir

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listn, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.



Photo taken by my uncle, James H. Swearingen, in 1923 on "family transcontinental trip by auto"



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Boyhood Streets: Berkeley 1916

Boyhood streets -

same chill wind through same bare trees.

New moon.

Top photo: my uncle, Marshall Swearingen, on his 10th birthday

in Berkeley, California 1916

Bottom photo: my uncle, Richard Swearingen, in Berkeley, California 1916




Haiku by Ken Wagner, Haiku Habits

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