PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Can we disagree to agree?: Can we disagree to agree?

Thank you.  I will recount,: Thank you.  I will recount, here, a story about my mother, in which her parenting strategy came back to roost, so to speak.  When I was learning to ride a tricycle, and then a small bicycle, I took a lot of spills, many skinned knees.  My parents, if they were watching, very often laughed at me.  Before they had adopted me, they had observed other parents making a big deal out of the smallest injury, which, my parents believed, gave the child more reason to scream and also weakened the child's fortitude.  During the summer after first grade, my day played softball with the church league, on a ball field that was, essentially, in the middle of acres and acres of cornfield.  The bathroom facility was an outhouse, down a gravel path from the concreate bleachers.  My mother and I had visited the outhouse, and walking back, her shoes slipped on the gravel and she landed on her rear end in a kind of tumble that would have made a clown proud.  She landed hard with her legs at a right angle to the rest of her body, as if she were sitting stiffly in a lounge chair.  I began to laugh.  She reprimanded me and I laughed harder.  After she got up, she lifted me up by my wrist, so that I was kind of dangling and began to swat me with her other hand.  I was nearly hysterical with the hardest and longest laughter I have ever experience.  So, she took me to the parking lot behind the dugout, put me in the car, and locked me in; then she returned to watch the game.  When she and my father returned, I had fallen asleep in the car, but upon waking I began laughing again and could not stop. When she told this story to with great indignity to my grandparents, who were visiting the next weekend, she apparently expected them to be as offended by my laughter as she was on the night of the incident.  My grandmother told her, "Why are you upset?  You have been teaching him to do that every time you laught at him when he falls of his bike.  What else would he know to do?"  After that, the open laughter following a small injury completely stopped; although, after each injury, they always told me that I wasn't really hurt, and that the injury didn't really hurt---it was all in my mind. I watched the Warner Brothers Bug Bunny cartoons well into my adolescence, and when, during adolescence, I heard Daffy Duck say, in one of those cartoons, "I can't stand pain," I began to repeat that in my father's presence, any time I had opportunity to bring it up in conversation.  He was far more dignified in his anger than my mother was, but my repetition of that line was always met with the sternest of scowls.

So much is going on: So much is going on underneath the textual expression that makes this poem weightier than its few lines betray. At least I am perceiving more than its denotation. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you.  Although she and: Thank you.  Although she and my father made great sacrifices to adopt me, giving me a historical surname that I am most unworthy to bear (just "Starward" will do), my mother's antagonism was difficult for me, at that time, to understand.  Before I turned six years old, she actively criticized my burgeoning interest in classic horror stories, manifested for me, then, in the Universal films of 1931-1945.  One of our nosiest neighbors suggested to my mother that I had become obsessed (as a young adolescent man, down the street, had been labeled with a Shakesperian obsession), and that obsession was a sign of mental instablity.  This became the chief verbal weapon in my mother's arsenal, and she lost no opportunity to label any strong interest of mine as an obsession.  That is one of the reasons why---in the week before Labor Day, 1968, when I received a glimpse of beauty that bestiired in me such a romance as to explain my nature even though I did not know the proper language of such an explanation---I could not tell her, even in the most oblique terms, of my experience.  The following summer, when I first actively listened to "bubblegum pop" on my small AM radio, listening for several hours every day, she again deemed me obsessed.  And you can imagine the storm set off when I announced, on October 13, 1975 (forty-seventh anniversary coming up), that I wanted to write Poetry.    

Quite astonishing when even: Quite astonishing when even all nature seconds the motion of our hearts impression, mirroring who they were and what it has become for us. Quite a few things to resolve even years and decades after. And in the deepest part of us that seeking desire to honour them despite all the considerations. Powerful in its simplicity, that is the elegance of its expression.

Yes: Yes I know this Situation. Summed up in so few lines. As dismal as her best day Debbie