found mission
from a letter mailed 21 July 1992:
I want to teach people
without having a lesson plan & rows of desks.
I want to be outside
& get dirty
& write
& smell salt air
& help the environment.
Tag: Pennsylvania
weeping cherry
After I wrote this I found a photographer who was willing to take a picture of the weeping cherry tree, but it had already dropped its blooms. Maybe next year… Thanks to Rozanne Lee Anderson-Moreland for the photos.
weeping cherry
the most thoughtful gift
I’ve ever been given
she was a First Communion miracle
planted just for me
8 years old
our heights about matched
we grew up together
her hot pink flowers lit up the spring
and one year when she was little
robins nested in the heart of her crown
I never named her
five years later we grew apart
divorce took me to a smaller home
without a tree to call my own
but I still visited
still had a claim on that piece of earth
now, with my father gone,
the house and tree
willed to his wife,
she’s another thing I could lose any day
if I could have anything from that home place
I’d take a photo of her now
in marvellous bloom
higher than the house
also perpetual permission to trespass
to lay my bones down
on Walnut Creek shale
whenever it calls
Where I’m From
This poem uses a format George Ella Lyon has invited others to borrow to tell the story of where they are from.
Where I’m From
I am from newsprint
from Deep Woods Off! and Coppertone
three Rust Belt houses
moving up and down the social ladder
(the smell of the neighbor’s
lily-of-the-valley in the spring)
I am from creek shale and grapevine
twined into forts and swings
I’m from homemade applesauce
and too much booze
from Thomas Francis Browns
and William Joseph Schaafs
I’m from the secret-keepers
and the never-satisfieds
from the optimism of Good morning, morning glory!
and the poverty of That’s from hunger
I’m from Lenten incense, shamrock Trinities
I’m from Erie and Éire
from lake perch and cinnakuka
from the shot-up tail
of the Luck of the Irish B-17
that spared by German grandfather
and humid summers at the Shore
when Grandy showed me Saturn’s rings
the long wood shelves above my dad’s childhood desk
held the spiral-bound scrapbooks
with my grandfather’s cases and speeches
yellowed and tearing
charisma my father would never match
I am from immigrant industry
all of us broken
and heartsick for land
