Category: free verse

Glimpse

This post is a response to an April Poetry Month challenge issued by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, Poetrepository. She found some family photos this summer at her home place and thought it would be fun to write poems about them this month. Carol Wilcox (Carol’s Corner) and Kevin Hodgson, (Kevin’s Meandering Mind) are writing some awesome poetry this month (as always) along with Mary Lee.

 

nypl.digitalcollections.0e42ce50-00af-0133-b934-58d385a7bbd0.001.v

 

Glimpse

Do you ever
catch sight of yourself
in a photo, say, one
from long ago
that you never could have
been in? You get a glimpse
of a life you never
got to live. So it was
you were flipping through some photos and,
like when the hall mirror
captures your image momentarily,
there you are. You’re not
the one in the background
jumping up to be noticed,
or the one striding
to meet the camera,
broad, confident smile on his face.

No, you’re the one standing,
head slightly tilted, curious,
apart from the others,
on the edge of the gathering noise.
You’re the absent one,
fondling a stone,
the one you picked up
alongside the road because
the sun lit up its mossy green streaks
and the black was deep
and mysterious.
You delight
in the smooth, cool
weight in your hand.

– Steve Peterson

 

Notes

I’m using images from the New York Public Library’s digital collection, in this case, another photo taken by Ben Shahn.1 Click on the image and you can learn more about where and when it was taken.

It has been fun to look through these old photos. When I came across this photo of kids loading onto the school bus in a small town in West Virginia in 1935, I did a double take. The expression on the face of the boy in the foreground is like so many on my face in photos from my past. I began to imagine a connection across the years.

  1. I talked more about his work in the an earlier post. ↩

Past Time

This post is a response to an April Poetry Month challenge issued by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, Poetrepository. She found some family photos this summer at her home place and thought it would be fun to write poems about them this month. Carol Wilcox (Carol’s Corner) and Kevin Hodgson, (Kevin’s Meandering Mind) are writing some awesome poetry this month (as always) along with Mary Lee.

Public Domain via the New York Public Library
Public Domain via the New York Public Library

Past Time

After the corn failed
he finally gave up the farm
and moved to town having known
for a while that it was long past time
to go work alongside the others
in the factory that banged out
nails for the coffin maker
on the edge of town.

After the whistle blew,
they’d head for the bar
and remember those hard days,
how after they’d cultivated the field
all day under that hot June sun
they’d still have to milk the cows
by the light of the kerosene lamp.

This bar’s better’n that, they’d say,
and then a silence grew as,
heads turned down, they’d watch
memories float and burst
like foam on the beer in front of them,
knowing that soon it would
be past time for them to leave again.

– Steve Peterson

 

Notes

I’m using images from the New York Public Library’s digital collection, in this case, another photo taken by Ben Shahn.1 Click on the image and you can learn more about where and when it was taken.

As far as the theme? I think I’m working out some of the ways that the rural landscape has changed, my own particular family’s experience with that, and what all that history means for the people who live here. While my grandfather would only rarely be seen in a bar, I do know from family stories of the hardscrabble life so many farmers faced during the Great Depression and, really, through most of the 20th century. The story of the constraints of that farm life and the factory alternative (when there actually were factories to work at!) are pretty deep in the rural Midwest. I guess I’m trying to work out what this all means given the agrarian mythology that you’ll often hear.

PS. There really was a coffin maker on the edge of a town I lived in at one time in my life. And I once did work in a factory that made nails. I spent lunch talking to the men and women that worked there. In the 1970s when I joined them in the factory, many were from the farm at one time, or had relatives struggling through the ’70s on the farm.

  1. I talked more about his work in the an earlier post. ↩

Pa

 

Public Domain via New York Public Library
Public Domain via New York Public Library

Pa

There were times I didn’t really like him.
Heck. I hated him sometimes. The chores.
Hot days in the sun pitching loads of hay.
Cold winter mornings in the barn with the cows.

But there were some days I recall, now
that he’s gone, some days when the sun hung low,
and the hay lay mowed and stacked,
sweet green in the late afternoon sun,
on those days we leaned up against the wheel of
the empty wagon, shoulders practically touching.

We listened to the meadowlarks
trill from the fence posts.
Yup.
Maybe these times are all the water a guy needs
to put down roots and
grow into the rest of his life. Maybe
he don’t need no more.

— Steve Peterson

 

Notes

This post is a response to an April Poetry Month challenge issued by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, Poetrepository. She found some family photos this summer at her home place and thought it would be fun to write poems about them this month.

Here’s another photo from the New York Public Library’s digital collection. Another photo taken by Ben Shahn.1 Click on the image and you can learn more about where and when it was taken.

I was struck by the two younger men and the older man partly done with the chores; I say partly done because in the background you can see that there is still some mowing left to do. I began to imagine them as family members and what emerged was a poem about the inevitable conflicts that fathers and sons sometimes feel as they work together, but how much gets passed down despite these conflicts. I tried to write in the voice I imagined for the younger man on the right, at a later time in his life.

 

 

  1. I talked more about his work in the last post. ↩

Moses

Moses

Only a flash of crimson
against a sullen sky —
impossible fire,
fleeting comet — alights
on a bare branch dripping
in the orchard. He leans, tilts,
and lets loose a song so clear,
so filled with yearning,
the dark seas part.
The promised land
beckons.

— Steve Peterson

Little Rock, 1957

Little Rock, 1957

What happens to
a dream deferred?
Langston Hughes asked,
while for the children at school, I
ready that photograph
of the Little Rock Nine —
the one with the mob,
mid-shout, trailing a
stoic Elizabeth Eckford
dressed in white, clutching
her books with one arm,
ram-rod straight
ahead stare, eyes
on the prize, no one
to watch her back —
and I wonder, also:
what happens
to a hatred inured?

– Steve Peterson

 

Notes

I wrote this for the comment section at Mary Lee Hahn’s poem place last year for April Poetry Month. But as I look around at our current politics I wonder if all this practice with hate just makes us more accustomed to hatred.

March Ice

IMG_0831
Photo by Steve Peterson

March Ice

The puddle that melted in yesterday’s sun
froze again last night, first
from the edge, the shallowest part,
then inward where the water held fast
to a memory of warmth, even as the
darkness settled in. Lately, I’ve heard
the ducks down by the creek
remind each other that the trip north
was a good idea, although some
weren’t so sure, feet freezing as they were
on the shore ice. Even so, there’s a chance
the puddle will melt again today.
You know, sometimes it takes awhile
for the message to arrive, a while
for the heart to accept what it
does not want to hear.

– Steve Peterson

The heron knows something about waiting

Blauwe reiger / Grey heron Judith via Compfight

The heron knows something about waiting

The heron knows
something about waiting.
And the roots of the
bellwort, too,
deep down in
the still cool ground, they
wait for the soil to warm
just so before dropping
a bead on the surface
to explode, a yellow
burst against such
fine greenery.
Maybe,
if I stand still as a reed
near the pond and listen,
maybe, if from within
the ground that surrounds,
and if the earth tilts just so,
I might hear the call, sense
the movement, feel
the warmth, then
know the moment
is good and right
to emerge.

— Steve Peterson

Crows Gather

Oh, crow Pascal Hassenforder via Compfight

Crows Gather

Crows gather in the woodlot
near the creek. One floats

into a tree, followed by another,
then more strung across the sky ‒

from down the valley more than a dozen
in all, caws from the last of them

puncture the orange dusk. How
like my heart, these crows that float,

that meander across the cold-blue sky
and alight in the trees, hunched and peering:

watchful, timorous.

Silence grows in the frost
on the dark side of the trunks.

– Steve Peterson

Dust

Dust StormCreative Commons License Rajiv Bhuttan via Compfight

Dust

All things are
connected, they say
even the flutter
of a butterfly’s wing can
raise a typhoon
half-way across the world.
They say the dust that
rises in the warm,
March sun was born in
the core of a distant star.
Toward the end, it burst
and scattered itself
across the galaxy and
into the house where
it collects quietly under the bed.
They say there is a
moment when the old
becomes new, when the new
becomes old again, the disconnected
reconnects. To everything
there is a season. They say ashes
to ashes, dust to dust.

– Steve Peterson