Saturday, September 15, 2018

Aerial Video At Teachers' Strike - poem I read Friday Evening


I include here the poem I read yesterday at the Distinguished Writer Series Open Mike.  The featured reader for the evening at Emmanuel Presbyterian Church was Josie Emmons Turner. 

Aerial Video At Teacher's Strike

At the video's top, that is me,
a bit of yellow-green.  Screen grab,
print screen, paste into Power Point,
and Save As a Jay-Peg.

This can appear from several positions.
I share on Facebook the photo
from my track phone -
the helicopter up above.

Police motorcycles drove up,
intersection-circled, and parked in a row.

The helicopter circled at the top view
the building which was
the Lynn Funeral Home, the building
and me, the bit of yellow-green.

The bit of yellow green which can appear
from several positions does not know
why police motorcycles
intersection-circled and parked.
It is hours later, when I look at the aerial video
the motorcycles escorted marchers to the rally.

And hours later, Inside, inside, the lady
who had become bent over
with osteoporosis, she walked with a cane.
It was 1985, my mother bent over.

Her funeral was at First Lutheran in 1986.
How the family was long ago in 1985.  My Aunt.
We saw a child outside see many cars
go by with the police escort to the cemetery.

I was walking to the library.  The family.
Ancestry Dot Com.  The 1940 U.S. Census.
For some chance to glimpse
my father.  At the Olympia archive months back

a younger person than my father,
but my father, unmistakeably.
Three photos, my father holds a camera
my father climbs a ladder,
and most clearly,
my father stands beside another man.

At the latest early 1941, for my father
left the pharmacy job at Northern State Hospital
early in 1941.  From a name
in the U.S. Census, from portraits in U.W.
year books, from obituary bios
of the wife of the other man, and the man -

he was a chemist at Northern State Hospital
where he met his wife who graduated
from Sedro-Wooley High School and became
Northern State Hospital's switchboard operator.

She lived nearby.  He was phi-beta-kappa.
An elected official recommended my father
who worked his way through pharmacy school
as a cook for Standard Oil.

From the ladder my father takes a picture.
He takes a picture that is the aerial video.
He takes the aerial video from the sky
of so many marchers in red.

Does anyone see how hard that is?
To walk and walk and have no job?
To walk and walk beyond the jail
that appears on another rim of the video,

and to walk beyond the library – to walk
to Work Force to walk and walk
and have no job?

I walked and walked.

1 comment:

Oona said...

This is a powerful piece, and intricately crafted. Thank you.