Category: historical subjects

Great-Grandfather Tells What Happened

There is this family story of my great-grandfather’s death during the Moose Lake, Cloquet, and Duluth Fire of 1918. I have the letters my grandfather’s older brothers wrote to the other brothers describing that day. I’ve often wondered what that day must have been like. Adopting his persona helped me imagine.

I chose to write this prose poem using the persona of my great-grandfather, which was inspired by Amy Ludwig VanDerWater’s, Poems are Teachers, “Adopt another Persona” p. 75. One of my goals is to use April Poetry Month to explore this terrific resource.

Great-Grandfather Tells What Happened

Ralph and the boys found my body up there on the hill and even though he told Sophia that I looked “peaceful” and “only a little burned,” he wrote to Helge, who had shipped out with the AEF early in the fall, that when they found me a couple days after the fire they barely recognized me: “just a spot of white” amongst the destruction. Yes, sir, we knew that fire was out there to the west all morning; reports of flames and smoke kept arriving by telephone, spread through the party line. And then Floodwood, then Arnold burned. Then Woodland, which was us. So when the winds changed and the smoke and embers poured over the hill, Verner and the others took off through the swamp to find safety in the lower ground with the hope that the lake breeze would keep the fire away. But I turned back to open the barn door so the horses could escape. Their frantic neighs and white-eyed fright, oh my, that was too much for me to take. And it didn’t take long before I realized my time was up. The fire jumped the barn and closed off the way downhill. So, I said a prayer for the kids and Sophie. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you’d choose. But by then the only choice left to me was to go up the hill, to outrun the fire, which, as we found out, did not happen. Not even close.

– Steve Peterson

Some Memories Trace an Oval

Been thinking about my own anger and outrage at the current political situation and, also, seeing more clearly how outrage and anger are situational, that my sense of prior peace was, in many ways, bought at the price of ignorance, or, better yet — ignore-ance.

via Unsplash

Some memories trace an oval

Some memories trace an oval,
a parabola that returns
to where it started –
like that exercise in geometry class
where you slice a cone
with one mighty whack then
trace its edge with your pencil
until your arrival
at the end of the line finds you
at the beginning again.

Back in ‘68, on the sidewalk next door,
old man Korter clutched his broom,
swept his walk in the summer dusk.

Cicadas sang from the treetops.
Through my bedroom window,
I listened to the summer settle in.

Murders, then riots.
I did not know
the desperation of those years.

Each stroke
cleared clipped grass
from the chipped concrete,

his fingers wrapped tightly
around the handle. A man
dead on a balcony in Memphis.

Sixty-miles to the east,
Chicago burned.

The walkway clean. A
screen door slapped shut.

– Steve Peterson

Performance Art

Here’s a small poem that came from another Ben Shahn photo, which was left over from an attempt at a poem every-other-day during April. (Click here for more on my fascination with Ben Shahn.)

From the New York Public Library
From the New York Public Library

Performance Art

We write our lives
in the small things we do:
bare feet on the cold floor,
the bed made, sheet and quilt
pulled up just so;
hands dipped into a basin,
the still-damp towel
hung to dry. Your smile
warms me when I enter the kitchen
after the cold night.
We write our lives
in the things we do.
Our penmanship grows
better with practice.

– Steve Peterson

Considering Anna Atkins and the Brown Algae of Britain

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.510d47d9-4b47-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.001.v (1)
Public Domain via the New York Public Library

 

Considering Anna Atkins and the Brown Algae of Britain

Was it love that moved her
over a slippery beach at low tide
collecting her specimens,
lifting seaweed
from the rocks? Even before Darwin,
she was a seer,
one who sought pattern
in a world of difference,
saw change hidden beneath
the relentless waves.

Who will remember all of
the small things,
the odd little things.
the silent, still
and mute things?

No one walks through
mud anymore. None
collect things – the variety
of the finches’ beaks; the sex life
of barnacles; these
are beneath our notice.
Who slogs among the leeches
of the Malay Archipelago
to bring home beetles? Who
climbs the thin-aired Andes?
Who scuffs among tundra plants,
swatting at mosquitoes? Kneels
to inspect mosses? Or listens
for the seabirds lost
to the fog of the Pribilof Islands?

When did this change? Was
it gradual, this forgetting how to see?
Did we lose it slowly
like the light leaves
the sky at the end
of the day, when suddenly,
we look up from our chairs
and notice that darkness
surrounds us.

– Steve Peterson

167.tif
Public Domain via the New York Public Library

 

I’m using images from the New York Public Library’s digital collection, in this case, a set of photos from the digital collection of Anna Atkins’ book, Photographs of British Algae. You can read more about her here. I was intrigued that she was an early believer in evolution, albeit of the Lamarckian kind.

I write this on Earth Day, a day I usually do not celebrate since, as my partner says, “everyday needs to be Earth Day.” This poem is probably harsher than I really believe, although, these days, it is easy for a person to despair. Recently, I read about how some are thinking that this newest “epoch” should be called the “Anthropocene“, since we humans have made quite a mess of things.

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. ↩

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. ↩

When the threshing crew arrived

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

When the threshing crew arrived

she’d add in some leaves,
then cover the table
with a stiff white cloth,
dust off the plated silver
and the serving bowls,
which she’d heap full
of mashed potatoes,
boats full of gravy.

They’d spoon sugar
into tiny coffee cups
held by rough hands,
scrubbed red but stained
with grease from tinkering
with the power train belt
that broke in the field.

She cut the cake while
they ate in silence –
this gathering of men
bound by blood and common need
and by the desire for
just one more slice
of that lemon cake before I go,
if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.

– 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.

The photo above is one of several I will use from a fantastic collection of historic photos in the New York Public Library digital collections. This is from the Farm Security Administration and was taken by Ben Shahn in 1938 in central Ohio. I discovered a lot of photos taken by Shahn, a favorite artist of mine, in the collection.

This photo struck me because I grew up with many stories about the threshing crew’s visits to my dad’s farm in north central Minnesota during the late ’30 and 40’s. If I remember right, the relatives and neighbors had various pieces of equipment that they would cobble together for the harvest season. Then they’d go around from place to place helping each other “bring in the sheaves.” At dinner time, they’d sit around the table, usually decked out all fancy and filled with food, then eat in silence: men in rough clothes straight from the field, grandmother’s labors greatly appreciated. (She cooked all that stuff in a wood burning oven. No electricity at the home place until the early 1950s!)

One year, my father gave me the dining room table from the home place as a present. It’s a distinctly un-fancy red oak oval pedestal table. There are nicks and scratches on the legs and table top. Some of the leaves are made of poorer quality wood that contains worm holes, for instance, but it extends out very far and holds a lot of history, in a Swedish wabi-sabi sort of way. The table was a wedding present for my grandparents in 1920; it was already used by the time they were given it by some long-forgotten relatives. For a time it disappeared and no one really remembered it until Dad found it languishing in the basement of a relative several years ago. He stripped the ubiquitous green paint off it and repaired and refinished it. When I sit down to eat, I often think of the threshing crew that once gathered around that table.

One Brilliant Day

Via the Vesterheim Museum, Decorah, IA
Via the Vesterheim Museum, Decorah, IA

One Brilliant Day

A stolid Lutheran, in the photo she was
strapped into those boxy black shoes,
practical armor for the day ahead,
and for most of her life, until she began
to see things that others could not,
Anna leaned into her life, every day, as
she leaned into that well pump handle.

There was Anton, shot up as he waded ashore at Tarawa,
the gathering of uniforms, the knock at the door;
and the sale of the horses after the bank foreclosed,
the neighbors gathered in the barnyard, the move to town;
the slow loss of Emil’s mind as his heart gave out.

But now, as the shutter snapped,
on one brilliant day in March,
she was there, once again,
at the well pump. Capable hands
grasped the cool handle as she leaned in
to draw from the depths
her daily ration of the living water.

– Steve Peterson

Notes

This post is a response to a 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 in April.

Since I don’t have a flock of family photos handy right now, I’m using historical photos from various places. I spent the last several weeks exploring and finding a group of photos to think and write about.

The photograph in this post comes from the Vesterheim Museum, our local Norwegian-American museum. At school we’ve worked with them (they are excellent!) on some immigration and history projects. This photo comes from some of that work.

I have no direct connection to the person in this photo, although it could easily have been my grandmother on my father’s side of the family. Through the 1950s she lived on the farmstead, a hardscrabble farm in north central Minnesota. During all the time they lived there, they hand-pumped water from a well, kept animals of many types, raised some row crops as well as oats and hay for the horses. They barely got by. When grandfather died, grandma sold the animals, tools, and machinery and moved from the farm.

The events in the poem are not from my family’s story. As the son of a teacher and a Lutheran preacher in small town Illinois, I spent a lot of time during my youth in church basements talking to people. I got a real appreciation for the lives of those who lived in the rural midwest.

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.