Decoration Day

 Why! Tell me why! 

 Do the boys in gray 

 March off to die?

 Why! Why! 

 This black array 

 Stay! Stay!

 Lay thy heavy arms 

 Must Cain always cry? 

 But go the gray

 from my arms 

 Into fields from home

 to die

Good day

 The Plan

Wendell Berry

My old friend, the owner

of a new boat, stops by

to ask me to fish with him,

and I say I will-both of us

knowing that we may never

get around to it, it may be 

years before we’re both

idle again on the same day.

But we make a plan, anyhow,

in honor of friendship 

and the fine spring weather

and the new boat

and our sudden thought

of the water shining

under the morning fog.

LRS

 LRS

Johnclarestokes 

Years beyond my time in the garden

Some descendant of someone will

hear his father call the little one

to bring him the LRS trowel

and as another bulb is set in the soil

and the little boy returns to the nail

the LRS trowel

they will think what a fine tool it is 

the little one piece relic

that fits perfectly in the hand. 

The no blist’r trowel of 

Luther Ray Stokes

Ole Sopchoppy

 Of bread pudding and Fiddle tunes

Johnclarestokes 

Mary Robinson Davis Rudd  1885-1960. My fathers first appointment to the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church was the tiny Mayberry-like town of Sopchoppy in Wakulla County in 1955. The panhandle town of under 600 was located on the banks of the crooked dark waters of the Sopchoppy River, which ran into the Oclockonee River, which ran into the Gulf at Panacea. My father preached one Sunday at Sopchoppy, then the next at the county seat of Wakulla in Crawfordville.  My mother taught fourth grade at the nearby native stone school and during the day Mrs Mary kept me. Mrs Mary and Mr Emory Rudd lived next door to the church and parsonage on Rose Street in a wooden one story white cracker style house with the two front rooms off the dog trot ending in the rear kitchen. I loved the time with the Rudd's, looking forward each morning to Mr Emory showing me the rats he had trapped in the barn the evening before, saving me his match boxes and Prince Albert tobacco tins to play with.  A good carpenter, Mr Emory made me a nice wooden high chair I could use to sit at the kitchen table with. Mrs Mary and we would walk about the yard and collect the eggs the chickens had laid in the barn and under the bushes in the yard. She would then make me my favorite food of all time, her special bread pudding.  It had to be the eggs I always assumed, for even to this day, the consistency has never been matched. Maybe the ingredient was nostalgia. Mr Emory was a fiddle player in a band with his first wife Susie that played down at the skating rink across the street on the Sopchoppy river and he liked to rock a horsey me on his foot and sing an old dance hall tune, though I’m not too sure Mrs Mary approved. They had a nice front porch swing under the shady magnolia where I would lazily lay and watch as the occasional car would pass or listen to Mr Burches marching band down at the field practicing. I knew mamma would be coming soon to get me. One morning in 1960, mamma told me I would not be going to Mrs Mary's today. I remember looking out the window in our living room to their house and seeing a hearse. I had never seen one but instinctively knew. That evening mamma and daddy took me over to the house and there Mrs Mary was, lying in wake in the front room in the bed, hands crossed, sleeping it seemed. . It was one of the first death's I had seen, yet somehow I understood at the age of five. Soon after I went to stay with Mrs Willie Mae Porter and her daughters across the street, then the beloved Angeline “Plump” Donaldson, who kept me in our home until we moved to Monticello in 1963. But of all the dear ladies who kept me, none were loved more than Mrs Mary. My heavenly food I know will not be manna but Mrs Mary’s bread pudding.

One

 One

I've this warped concept

Of one sitting out there

Hanging for dear life

Upon every word

Every scene I bring to her

Famished

Thanking me profusely 

For rescuing her

From the rushing stream

Of pablum

 But then I see

In reality

She's not reaching for me

It's the damn remote

On the TV

And the walking dead

Is coming on.

Seal of a lover

 Seal of Approval 

It was approximately six on a Thursday

The committee for the Good Housekeeping

Seal of Approval 

Came knocking

They said according to their criteria

They had awarded us the 

Good housekeeping seal of Approval

For being lovers going above and beyond

The call of duty. 

The committee quizzically inquired

Is your wife at home?

When it was about that time

From the master bedroom

A voice was heard

Honey, who is it?

That the award was snatched from my hands

Rescinded in an instant moment 

The seal upon the door scraped off

The subscription cancelled. 

And To think

I was almost a Good Housekeeping lover.

Bound

 Bound

We are mostly bound books

Unread upon the shelves

Your story not interesting 

To any but you

And maybe if fortunate

One or two

Possibly your mother

The once lover

But that’s about it

Prose in purple

 Purple Prose

I went in search of

The purple lined composition paper

You once copied out the prose upon

I could only find the 

Marbled black and white books

Somehow the prose just wasn’t the

Same written in them

Something was missing

Your long hand

Your long flowing hair

Or so I convinced myself so.

Solitary man

 Solitary man 

What kind of mother

That she left her children

To another

I think it was little Elijah

Who suffered the most

His days mostly spent

Turning the cards 

Placing the Queen

Just so

The queen he never did

Know

It shows

Screen time

 I hear the ole screen creaking

and I wake in the evening from dreaming

to see who may be slipping in

but it was just the wind slapping 

I start to lift the latch to silent it

but I leave it open and return to bed

the breeze sighs and soon we return to dream.

Screen and spring

 Screen and Spring 

In our home we had a screen we children

greatly despised, for it was in collusion with

Spring  and no matter how soft our slipping

out, it would creak out our attempt to lift

the latch to escape the inside chores

mamma would inquire did you clean your room

or some such indoor imprisonment before

we could get past that infernal door of doom

and it was just as vigilant always on guard

when late in evening past curfew we’d try

to slip in not to wake mamma sleeping hard

but no matter how tenderly she wasn’t bribed 

Mamma would wake and scold us to bed

Years passed and we left that ole home

Moved into fancy places without screens

Our children pretty much left to their own 

I’d give anything just to hear that screen sounding

Joyfully telling mamma

Your little ones have come home again.

Screen call

 Screen Call

Sunday nights we would sit out

on the porch listening to the 

drums of New Mt Zion thinking

it sounded as the Waziri in the 

Tarzan movie and we would 

shiver in the swelter heat. 

Eventually the tribe would 

disperse, sparing us to have 

to tuck in early for the dawn bus.

We were timid to venture the

next afternoon across the field

in the direction of Zion, fearing 

some hungry cannibals lurking.

We never ventured too far from 

sparse back porch, where we 

knew when time came, mamma

would call us home, safe from

the drummers of New Mt Zion ever searching for a meal.