PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Seventeen years ago, you departed this earth;

ninety-nine years ago, today, Grandma gave birth

to you.  Thirty-two years later, you adopted me

into your vast and much extended family,

and its long, ancient, illustrious history,

impervious to managed timeclocks' tyranny.

Through you, your sister's Roman Catholicity,

helped lead my soul, later, to Orthodox spirituality.

For Christmas, in that distant year, nineteen sixty-three,

three months into kindergarten (I was then five),

you gave me a plastic figure, Frankenstein,

which seven years hence, brought my joy in books alive.

My seventeenth year led to a real discovery

of the glories of epic and lyric poetry.

By that time, we both knew that I was different (some said, "strange")

regarding what attracted my nature (that has so often fled

prudes and haters).   On our street, malign,

and nosy gossips happily heaped prejudiced blame

upon you for the patterns of my given nature

that offended them (for that, they used crude, vulgar  nomenclature,

and whispered, all over, the word, "degradation")

and because I felt quite well justified to really want

a screen name (having come to hate my given first name---

much mocked in school---and so I sought a new identity;

I felt that I could use a radical change).

Starwatcher, it began, and then became Starward- led.

Then that same summer, some of your words gave me a lift

when you acknowledged how much, how deeply, I loved BlueShift.

"Jerry"

fka as "Fairy Jerry"

fka

Starwatcher

nka

Starward-Led

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