Glenn Cumulus plays the five string line
Saturday, June 28, 2025
Daliwood
Staying Stoked in Daliwood
And what shall we create today?
Or shall we just scroll the day away?
Get off that lard laden posterior
Form a band and rank a superior!
Beneath the stucco fence
Beneath the stucco fence
John Clare Stokes
In innocence where once they leaned
to steal their first kiss deep beneath
their feet a rumbling earth gave rise to
coal to warm the homes upon the steep
holler steps the old Orander buses rusting
beside the narrow road that carried the
fathers and the brothers far within the
Crumpler mountains returning to the shrill
whistle of miners shifts ending, unrecognizable covered in coal dust
a mass of one shuffling men all laboring
below while above in white snow lingered
two near the stucco fence that kept them
separated daring never to cross for
Ethel saw it all from her upstairs room
the daily coming and the going of who
was returning from Northfork and who was
going to Bluefield even down to hearing
the soft purring in the cellar dank, lapping
the milk stolen from the ice box while
Ethel ironed the bus mans clothes over
looking the first generation of the Italian
family in search of a dream within the
coal seams and steal perchance their
own first kiss to start a family living in
the yellow company home and if by hard
labor they gathered enough script they
too could move up the Mountain into a
house of blue where from their up stairs
windows they could count the coming and
the going who was meeting who by the
yellow stucco fences below to steal their
daughters away, far away from the
separation of their fences, of the
rumblings deep beneath their trembling feet.
The entrance to my mother’s childhood home in Crumpler, West Virginia. Mamma told of her first beau, a young Italian lad.
Men of steel
Men of Steel
John Clare Stokes
by night the broken men
would sip within the cemetery
of Mann atop the hill overlooking
the dying town where once the
coal they said would never end
lamenting or celebrating
we never knew
we only knew that they were
up there
like the ravens in the trees
leaving their droppings
too poor to be buried atop
the cemetery of Mann
moving on come the dawn
into the hills and the hollers
living off the welfare dollars
high above the dying town.
On a hill in Bluefield, West Virginia is the Mann family cemetery where derelicts like the drink.
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Johnny Appleseed
Legend has it Johnny Appleseed
went about spreading seed
others tell of a Bouquet Boy
Who went about gathering joy.
Psalm 97:11
Johnny went about the land
Spreading beauty for all to see
We just couldn’t understand
How beauty sprang from the ugly
Last Wednesday
Last Wednesday
Johnclarestokes
What were you doing on
your last Wednesday fifty-four
years ago?
Did you spend most of the day
under the pecan out front,
in the stationary conversation chair
with the broken back?
Did you piddle in your garden
beside the out house?
Were you by yourself most of the day
with Bernice at the school lunchroom?
Did the sons William, Billy or Jimmy come by?
What of daughter Mary?
Did Luke, Curtis or Marzell call or write?
Irene or Hazel, your first daughters by your Ethel Marie
So pretty she was
Did they come from Forest to visit?
What about the Methodist pastor across the street?
Did he wave to you on his way to mid week
services?
Were there warning pains you just chalked up
to a hard Homewood, Mississippi life?
I was only fourteen in Williston, Florida
I would have taken the Trailways out to visit you
Like we used to do
Had I known it was going to your last
Wednesday.
Bill and Sally
Bill and Sally
Pulling up with Roscoe at the Watertown lake dock, we surveyed the vehicles to see whom we may recognize. One we miss seeing is the Nissan Frontier that meant Bill Chandler and Sally were already there from their Sunday morning ride through the Osceola Forest.
New friends now take the place that Eagle Eye once took. We know there is probably an Eagle out there in the trees along the bank, but without Bill to point them out, we don’t know.
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
33
Every
Artist
Needs to carry
With him
His means
Of inspiration
For me
It's the old
Thirty-three
I lug along
It's portable
And I can wind it
Like the one in
Out of Africa
Even have a long
String
So when I'm
Between shots
Chimping
I can play
The Glen Miller
And soon
I'm jumping about
And cavorting
Imagination
Gone wild
Imagine that
The dying child
Amazon sent my copy of Poems by John Clare from Forgotten Books. This is the next to last poem in the book.
The Dying Child
by John Clare
He could not die when trees were green,
For he loved the time too well.
His little hands, when flowers were seen,
Were held for the bluebell,
As he was carried o'er the green.
His eye glanced at the white-nosed bee;
He knew those children of the Spring:
When he was well and on the lea
He held one in his hands to sing,
Which filled his heart with glee.
Infants, the children of the Spring!
How can an infant die
When butterflies are on the wing,
Green grass, and such a sky?
How can they die at Spring?
He held his hands for daises white,
And then for violets blue,
And took them all to bed at night
That in the green fields grew,
As childhood's sweet delight.
And then he shut his little eyes,
And flowers would notice not;
Birds' nests and eggs caused no surprise,
He now no blossoms got:
They met with plaintive sighs.
When Winter came and blasts did sigh,
And bare were plain and tree,
As he for ease in bed did lie
His soul seemed with the free,
He died so quietly.
Seth
On the shelf
Seth Thomas
Has determined
To stop perpetually
At a half past
4:36
We have no key
To revive him
So twice a day
We visit him
And remind him
He is right on time.
It's the least
We can do
For all the times
He kept us
On time.
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