Johnclarestokes
Alvin Lee I would listen to
going home, to see my baby
I'd love to change the world
Everywhere freaks and fairies
We thought yesterday
Back to two oh thirteen
and before that oh three
and on and on back the
Ten years after
And how much happened
In the last Ten Years After
And wondered what could
Possibly happen in the next
Ten Years Coming.
And what of this old life?
Waters paddled upon
Rivers crooked and long
Some we've been upon
Many, many a time
Others never to see
In our Old Town journey
In our Williston years, my father and I maintained a bed of worms, “the best you ever saw” said Bobby Sandlin who lived next door, the worm bed defining our property line. The bed was fed by the bantam chickens manure we raised in a pen my father made, by cow manure from the Elliot Whitehurst’s huge feedlots, and every scrap left from meals mamma made and the vegetables and leftovers from the garden beside the parsonage.
And people would come and we’d dig for them a hundred wigglers for a dollar, an easy task for there were thousands in big clusters when you turned up the rich compost.
When we moved from Williston to Lake City, like all our prior moves, daddy took a large quantity of worms to start a new bed. My father always maintained one where ever we lived, for he loved to fish. I don’t miss so much the digging, but I sure miss fishing with him in Pappy’s lake.
We climbed and climbed for hours on end
It seemed we’d never reach the summit
We heard beyond there was this vast ocean
We flung our lives as to the waves we’d plummet.
Johnclarestokes
in the latter years, came the cankerous men, burning, creating wastelands, removing the old landmarks, swarming, ravenous as locusts, wandering, devouring, in the aftermath, the drought came, in the parched wail, birthing, a new world, disordered, discordant, disconnected, decadent.
by Johnclarestokes
Father I trust you will forgive me
For they were Dollar General Zinnias
Four packs for a mere dollar
And I am not even sure
If I can get them to grow
the way they would for you,
Even though from far,far away
the seeds you'd let me spread,
little colored buttons soon opening
to sauce pan size growing,
and we would gather up a bouquet
upon the altar bowing as you prayed
the repentant would kneel near
the zinnias between you and their tears
watering them
perhaps revealing why
the zinnias grew so greatly.
Oh father
bless from on high
the dollar general zinnias
with my efforts be pleased.
Ernest Stokes, father of Luther Stokes in Homewood, Mississippi
The two entries came with a price. Normally I frame my own as cheap as possible from Amazon. This year I had Picture Frame Design double matt and frame them. He really liked the B@w as it reminded him of his home place in Indiana. He said it was fine art as it was printed on high quality fiber paper. I enter them tomorrow,0n a threshold of a journey and The back way home.
Johnclarestokes
My father first began growing and making sugar cane syrup in the mid seventies after acquiring from Wakulla County farmers the necessary implements,the old Golden Mill, the Columbus 60 gallon kettle and various straining tools, one being an old Chevy moon hubcap with holes drilled in it. When we lived in Sopchoppy in the fifties and sixties, we would annually attend the syrup cooking of Bert Rodenberry and Kenneth Strickland who taught my father how to properly cook the syrup, though he already knew much from his growing up on a farm. He got a local brickmason Mr Dick Snyder, to make his first chimney and kettle holder in what we called the sugar shack, a little cabin built around the kettle with a bath,kitchen and bedroom where we spent much of our time heated by the old wood stove. He called his syrup, Old Homewood, after the town in Scott County Mississippi where he was born and raised. I drew up some labels for the wild turkey and store bought bottles. With the help of the trusty Gravely tractor rigged on the cross beam to stay locked in a turning direction, it was up to the children and grandchildren and various relatives and friends to feed the stalks of cane into the mill, remembering sometimes not to duck each time the pole came around, giving all a laugh at their expense. It was our annual tradition at Thanksgiving to cook down the cane juice in the 60 gallon kettle to about ten gallons of syrup, the process usually finishing around noon where mamma and the girls usually had the tables under the trees ready for wonderful eating. It was always a tense and sometimes testy moment just before the kerosene fire from the rabbit box burner was turned off and the boiling came to an end. Too long and the syrup would be full of black flecks or dregs, too soon and it would not have the right consistency. Knowing when to dip the syrup out at the precise specific gravity from the hydrometer, usually around 16 we used to measure the syrup, or when the syrup candied when spilling off the dipper was often a hit and miss experiment. I still have several bottles of Old Homewood and tell myself, someday I will set up the Golden mill, which I recently did in the back yard after my father passed away in March of 2011, leaving it all to me, but it is looking more and more like this tradition may have died when my father did in Williston. I hope not.
What were her qualities?
Why did she
Get the job?
Simply she was pretty
And young
Just blooming
Yesterday.
More the cynic
He'd become
It was no leaf
Smiling happily
At the tiny
hopper
No, it was
Guillotine
Ready to
Lop her
head
The night
He especially
Did dread
With the
Turning
Wheel of fortune
Jeopardy
Awaiting
Craven
The cynic cycle
Landing repeatedly
Upon bankruptcy
Giving it back
Headless hoppers
Haunting him
Sharp leaves
Cutting
Morning longed for
The beginning anew
Perhaps this day
Making it til noon
Quietly tipping
Not waking the
Cynic sleeping
In the other
Room.
