Poetry in Motion

So in my never-ending desire for a degree I am slowly whittling away at it by taking night classes. I can't get money for college anymore so it is coming out of my pocket entirely without any assistance. So this semester I'm taking Creative Writing:Poetry. On the side I have been trying to get the university more involved with all things Spiva. I mentioned to my teacher that it would be a cool idea to use our current photography exhibit for an experiment. She jumped on the idea immediately. The students came to see the exhibit and based poems on the photos in the show. Then we had a reading of the poems in the gallery with each photo being displayed behind them on a screen as they read. It was a huge success beyond my greatest hopes! So here is one of the poems I wrote. If you all like it I will post the other two. I'm not sure if people respond to poetry on my space or not.


Inspired by Family of Origin: Skiers

Here they were:

Grandpa with a crew cut,
strong arms and a barrel chest,
the kind of physique you only see in old films
when men were still men.

Grandma thin but healthy,
legs tanned and tight,
wearing a full body swimsuit that shows off all her curves,
back when women were supposed to have curves.

The kodachrome color makes all these memories obscure;
world and past become unreal.
These can’t be my grandparents
they don’t belong to me
they don’t belong to my memory.

Sure they have told me stories of their life,
stories I knew were connected to them.
But it always seemed like they were relating a movie they had seen.
I could never place them in the stories.

Grandpa a puny boy with asthma,
the runt of the family,
the unloved and unfavored son.

When I was younger all the stories were of hardship
and personal glory at overcoming all obstacles of being underestimated.
Stories of outsmarting the smart guys with his sixth grade education.

He once showed me a picture of him as a boy with his brothers.
He pointed at his two older brothers and himself.
“Like stair steps” he said, “I’m the bottom”.

One day all the boys were dreaming of the future
A future away from the poverty and dirt roads.
Harvey was gonna be a doctor,
Warren was gonna be a lawyer,
Grandpa didn’t know what he was gonna be,
but what ever it was, he was gonna be a millionaire.
His brothers laughed and jeered at him.
Grandpa pauses in the telling, smiles slightly and says,
“Yep, they both ended up working for me”

It wasn’t always pride that was showing through,
it was vindication, not only had he survived,
he had shown graciousness in his triumph.

At the age of nine he was plowing a field
a boy, a plow and horse alone in the searing sun.
Having plowed from morning into the early heat of noon,
he took a break and went for a swim in a spring-fed pond.
His oldest brother came along and scolded him
jerking him out of the water and whipping his bare butt with
a blackberry briar.

That brother got a milking pail upside his head later that night.
That brother worked for him and they were close for life.

I have seen other pictures.
Pictures of parties,
everyone with a drink in one hand
and a cigarette in the other.
I recognize the sloppy smiles and half opened eyes
of the half lit.
They never told me stories about these times.
I recognize my Grandpa and Grandma in these cocktail parties.
The top shelf still has dozens of bottles even now
but I have never seen them ever once drink from any of them.

The kodachrome color makes all these memories look staged
from a Hollywood flash-back scene.
This can’t be my grandparents.

2009
Shaun Conroy