Why do I write? One of the first answers that occurs is, "Why doesn't everyone?" But that doesn't make sense. There is a reason why we are given different gifts. Otherwise, it would be as if we all traded names, then bought each other the same useless gift. Why would it be useless? Because without each other's differences -- all the talents, abilities and disabilities humanity has to offer -- we would not have lived to see the Stone Age. Need inventors, artists, thinkers, 'doers'...clowns...and all the rest! And we need to be shown what we are when intellect and health and the ability to speak, walk and process are missing. Because only then do we learn what those blithely bantered terms, "heart," "soul," "bravery" and "compassion" mean. Face it, I write because I can go on like this!
On a more personal level, reading and writing provided life rafts during a highly troubled childhood. The woman hired to care for me (before my parents' divorce) had little education...or anything else. But she read well enough that I fell in love with stories. The images! The escape!! Add to that great teachers and a fear of speaking up and a writer was born. (Genetics also had a hand, it would appear. Among other familial influences, turns out Edgar Allen Poe was distant kin.) Maybe these things explain why I write, maybe they don't. Life is nothing if not mysterious. But I can tell you one thing. After family and friends (in the larger as well as immediate sense), writing is my greatest love...and always will be.
Waiting for Floods
Look into an old-timey stereopticon
with ten-year-old eyes. A virtual village
called Beardstown is under attack
from an Illinois-fed Sangamon. A river
of prisoners are trucked in to put up a levee.
And it holds. All this time, the sun shines, hot and round,
as if to say, "I don't even drink."
Soon long tables are racketing into place
for a celebration. Catfish are losing to big iron skillets
with oily grins, while women in aprons slice cabbage
and onions for slaw. But the sand wall
has something in it of the horror
in that Saturday matinee. Makes me think
how the sun must have burned and scraped
their hands as they stuffed all those burlap miles.
How it pushed on their shoulders as they struggled
to carry all those bags they had filled.
The men who saved us had rippling muscles
and hands like dinner plates. But the sun was frying eggs
on walks. Sand must have prickled,
and the rough, brown cloth. Men who saved us
were black, one man said. If so, black
came in a hundred shades, each prettier
than the last. But "Gotta get rid of 'em quick"
mutters between slurps and scraping chairs.
"Haul 'em in, haul 'em out, be no trouble."
"Don't ask me why, you big-eared pitcher!"
So they saved our skin, a woman says, putting the lid on
butter that's running. "Why we trucked the jailbirds in!"
Used to it, aren't they. Take a gander at their backs!
"Dawn to past dark nothin'." But I think I see burnt flesh.
Blisters as big as the June bugs Brother and I collect.
Still. . .what beautiful colors: brown, rust, coffee, even blue
and purple. Caramel, yum. But these giant flies
have opened sores, and the 'squiters are awful.
"What is a roadgang, Daddy?"
"What's cotton and what's wrong with picking it?"
My brother and I risked being switched by haunting Their End
of the wall They heaved together. Where the real
celebration sang and more laughs curled
than cook-fire and cigarette smoke. Under wobbling,
paper-topped tables from Rich's Funeral,
our skinned kid knees bump and giggle.
Wriggling toes of here-for-a-day wives better
than party favors. All of us kids are sneaking pie
from between the casseroles with vegetables, eee-ick!
Until red-faced men wearing uniforms march between
the funeral chairs. The flood starts stinking more
of cow, horse, pig and 'mocassin. We saw them
being bumped by trees and somebody's roof.
We start eating with our fingers crossed
that the river will rise again.
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2000-2001 poetry credits include: Sensations, Three Candles, Floating Holiday, The Book Lover's Haven and The Blue Fifth. Green is also an author [Spinning Straw: the Jeff Apple Story, Diverse City Press, l999] and editor [Mixing Cement by Peter Tomassi, Thunder Rain, 2000 (a poetry collection)] and currently Associate Editor and, from time to time, Acting Editor at L'Intrigue.
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Letter to the Author:
Phyllis Jean Green at PJDGAUTH@aol.com