Shhh! Don't disturb Marcy, she's reading my newest poem, "Missing Blueberries."
My 13 fans may enjoy, as do I, Richard Thompson doing Vincent Black Lightning, Sumer is a Cumin in..... Eric Clapton's concerts.... the exciting R L Burnside, a blues brother sunk in obscurity until the blues revival in the 1990s... The Stray Birds... mon dieu isn't music wonderful!!!
Discovered Richard Thompson years ago from John, a former client of mine at the now-defunct Bristol-Bensalem Human Services.
John brought in a tape recording of Thompson doing The Wall of Death. I was so thrilled.
Thompson is a Muslim.And now I'm listening to k d Lang sing "Hallelujah" who looks GREAT in her white suit. Gosh I wish I were gay, so we could date. She'd love seeing me in my striped PJ outfit, which makes me feel like George Eliot.
Yes, I often need accompaniment when I write, esp if it's the witching hour.
Possibly I'll have a party at my house to mail them across the universe.
Dyou think it's a weakness on my part that I've GOTTA have someone read my poems?
MISSING BLUEBERRIES
You
wouldn’t happen to know
a
Miss Regina Ziegler would you?
I’ve
been studying her handwriting
to
figure out her first name,
I’m
no cryptographer so
can’t
rightly tell if it’s Regina
or
Rina, but it’s a mighty regal
“R”
she writes, with the sureness
of
a woman who loves poetry and
may
indeed write some herself.
It
was Miss Regina, as I’ll call her
who
once owned my sole
book
of poetry by Robert Frost,
the
cover of which states
“The
Pocket Book of
Robert
Frost’s Poems.”
Leave
it to me to check where
apostrophes
go. They ought to
get
it right, don’t you think,
the
editors, all dead now, I’d imagine,
as
is the poet himself.
Regina herself met a
terrible end
and
not meaning to keep you in
suspense,
bear with me a little while
as
I prattle on.
With
a number two pencil
Miss
Regina has lightly
underlined
some phrases,
not
many; like me, she probably
doesn’t
believe in marring a book.
“Plain
language and lack of
rhetoric,”
is where her pencil
first
touched the book. Then a
lapse
of fifty pages until
pencil,
resting in her mouth,
dared
come down again
“For
to be social, is to be
forgiving.”
And
there we have it. But
half
a dozen phrases underlined,
Miss
Regina, a spinster school marm who
taught
in the one-room school house,
a
converted barn with only eleven
children,
from blue-eyed Mary nearing
pubescence,
to tough Frankie who
begged
his daddy let him come and
learn
instead of mowing hay and
minding
the cows.
These
were the children she never had.
Did
she read them Frost? You bet she
did.
They loved the one about the blueberries
“as
big as the end of your thumb, real sky-blue and
ready
to drum in the cavernous pail of the first
one
to come!”
And
that goodly Miss Regina had brought silver buckets
of
blueberries and passed them around after class with
another
bucket of cold milk she brought from a neighboring
farm.
There were farms in those days. More than
you
can count. Just like there are shops today
teetering
on what used to be farm fields.
She
also read them a few about the stars up above
in
Heaven. Where we would all go when life has had
enough
of us. The eleven children made sure they
wished
upon a star every night, their little heads
pointed
upward, hands clasped together in prayer
as
their eyes skipped merrily across the sky.
Were
those owls they heard hooting in the distance?
Was
that the sounds of their families inside the
closed
doors? She introduced them to the wonders
of
the world. Would it ever leave them? On their
death
beds would they think, “It’s been a wonderful
life?”
One
winter it was too cold to walk the deep snow
to
get to school. Miss Regina turned on her coal stove,
glanced
at the glowing coals, black as the night sky,
warmed
her shivering hands and went back to
bed
to keep herself warm. She heard the explosion
first,
a sound like a million church bells going off
at
once.
Was
that her last thought as she catapulted, quilts
and
nightgown and all, from her straw mattress, floating up
up
up in the air
like
a bread rising in the oven?
Oh,
they would miss her all right.
And
I will miss her most of all for it’s
time
to mourn her once again,
to
think of Miss Regina and
eat
some blueberry yogurt
in
her memory. I like the kind
where
the cream rises to the top.
I must apologize profusely for being so lousy at keeping up with your blog. I have the best of intentions but find lately I just don't know where the time goes. As I write this now, I have been at the computer for hours and have food in the oven that needs tending. I must allocate some time to sit down and read as much as I can. I know I have missed some good stuff, and especially these poems I see which as you know, are my favorite things, and deserve some time and attention. So I will return soon, my friend. Sorry for a long absence,
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