It is late as you are about to enter Florida heading South on I-75 from Lowndes County. The concrete clunk, clunk, clunk of Georgia is hypnotic, looming ahead an exit. The only sign you see announcing this unincorporated town, the last exit before Florida. Exit 401, Lake Park Bellville Road. You tell your slumbering companion, lets get off this infernal concrete and travel down to have a look. You are about to enter the Twilight Zone.
I do not know what's all the fuss
I've seen ole Suwannee this low
Let her have her off season
She tires of your oversized Johnson's
Piercing her soft sandy bottom....
Granny said, child, did you throw them in the washing machine?
I said, just these green whites.
Granny, said, guess you just
Washed supper tonight.
we walked beyond riverside
slipping past those who died
Forms in the night lingering
Hovering above the cicadas
chirping in unison singing seee
seee see Beulah land seeee
beyond riverside above the
entrance arch a gathering
march oh seee seeee seee
the band of cicadas coming
for Mary oh seee seee see.
Emily Dickinson
I like a look of agony,
Because I know it's true;
Men do not sham convulsion,
Nor simulate a throe.
The eyes glaze once, and
that is death.
Impossible to feign
The beads upon the forehead
By homely anguish strung.
Gar Glare
Photo by John Stokes
Alligator Lake
john clare
Upon the eating
Of the pork chop
Special
Grilled
Not as fattening
He asked me
Who this
John Clare
Fellow was
I said
He was a poet
He lived in the 1700's
I never knew him
Upon the take out tea
Sweet
Fattening
I told him
It was me
I wrote the poetry
He looked at me
Doubting
I never knew.
Upon the driving home
I told my wife
Do I not only speak
In rhyme
All the time
And he never knew
And she said
I wouldn't know.
And the tea was sweet
And fattening
This we knew.
by john clare
There is a mountain ridge two
thousand feet above home
Too cold for the Mosquito's and
the malaria they bring
We should be able to talk clearer on
the hand phone
And build a new landing strip for the
valiant aviation wing.
It is there we shall move and build
again
Then continue the translation of the
Wano word
To free them from the superstitions
of sin.
And raise tribal missionaries from
whose lips the gospel is heard.
Come and join the Wilds in bringing
life to those below
Pouring their all from the heights
to the Wano people
We must pray and give so they can know
Christ dwells in the valley seven thousand
feet among the mosquito.
John Stokes
By the time Orion
Had lifted into orbit
Behind the fog
We were three miles
Down range east
Traveling at the speed
Of forty-five
Heading for our
Destination
Experimental mission
To see if
Man can sustain on
Hardee's biscuits.
Watertown Cormorants
John Stokes
Deep within the without
Form or void
A voice heard calling
Come forth
A creation of my own making in PicArts and PSExpress on the iPhone.
Times we’d come to the slow ebbing Suwannee
and in the foam from shoals read the writing
of our lives fleeting and what was to be
thankful to Him the source of our being.
Time was running thin as it was near time to leave. The deep fog was being burnt off in pieces as sporadic light entered. Viewing the sequence on the screen of the camera, it looked promising.
It wasn’t time to go, but is it ever?
D850 with 200-500.
We moved to Williston in 1967 to the Methodist parsonage on Noble Avenue by the stately yellow brick church my father pastored for ten years. Across the street where Hardee’s is today was the two story Wilson home with a trailer park. Valerie Jones Blackburn lived in the little trailer by the road beside the service station with her tame mockingbird. She had a daughter Marguerite Davis and son Harlan. Her husband Henry died in 1958. I often visited her, for she was a painter and she would always tell me, I am praying you marry a Williston girl.
I would dismiss it for I’d run through my list of old girlfriends and most were hitched or getting hitched. We moved from Williston in 1977 to Lake City and Valerie died on April 3rd, 1978 at age 77. Her prayer I forgot. In 1986 my niece Jessica was in Shand’s hospital and her nurse was a girl from Williston my sister insisted I meet.
The day arrived and Melanie entered to check on Jessica and we met. Though I mustered courage to later ask her to go with me to fanfare and fireworks, she turned me down since she was dating a doctor. I thought, that was that.
But then, a full year later, I got this letter from Williston. It was Melanie wanting me to show her how to use her “cannon” she recently purchased. She had remembered the zoo pictures I took and taped on Jessica’s bedside wall. She had broken up with the doctor too.
I had just returned from finding a note in the bottle at St Marks wishing who found this the same happiness Bob and Carolyn White had found. The timing was beyond coincidence.
As I drove to Williston the following Saturday, I thought of Valerie and her prayer.
That prayer was answered January 8, 1988 at Whitehurst Memorial Chapel, just a Mockingbird call from Mrs Blackburn’s trailer.
