Hi! I’ve been feeling a bit rambly lately, enjoying winter but also feeling threads of home wending their way through my thoughts. (I know…hey Mel, when are you NOT rambly? but I mean it in the highway/travel sense, not the wordy one.)
My grandfather would be turning 100 on the 19th if he were still with us. When I was sixteen, he made me promise to throw his centennial party whether he attended “in person” or not. I didn’t give it much thought back then; it was so far away.
Here we are, nine days away. He’s not here (he made it to 95! The eulogy I delivered when he left is on this blog somewhere) but I am thrilled to have had him in my life, and honored to throw a small (just household) party next week to celebrate his life. I’m not sad; I’m smiling and I know he is too, wherever he happens to be.
On a different note, it’s time to kick off 2022’s poetry offerings, I think! Here, I’ve been rambly in the more typical sense. 😉
new year’s is black-eyed peas and collard greens;
everybody knows that —
everybody who leans on a split rail fence in their heart,
peering across fields of warm dirt, sown dreams
and hopes that never learned to lie fallow,
reaching stubbornly, greenly up for sunlight’s searing kiss —
and here’s to them farmboys who grow up and go east,
trading tractors for boats and boots for deck shoes
and shorts all year round, those souls who could hear the sea
from the middle of a dusty corn row a hundred miles away.
your hands still sing of harvest time, different crops now,
etched landscapes revealed in lovers’ stories,
told in hale half-sleeping hours by the shore.
Do you like it? 🙂 I play with capitalization (or the lack thereof) but generally don’t stray from standard English in my poems…I’ve been thinking of re-evaluating that “rule” of mine; there’s a hint of that here.
melstery.com 