Memory
Speaking of things that are unsettling, it’s now time for our daily prompt — optional, as always! In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.
The earliest one, Athens, Georgia
Hot and red brick home
Red ants marching in their peculiar
brown-red uniforms
Hot steam rising all at once from boiling water
And smell of soap, dish washing soap
A smell that is second nature in civilised homes
Bucket of soap water being prepared in yard
Yard. That's what the American's called it
When I was American. A brief time.
Long, waving line of marching ants
Continuing unawares, in synchronous, infinite
time of lock-step
My father; thin body, thick black beard, young
Readying the water.
And me, hunkered down, with one un-understanding eye on the
marching column, a military target it seems.
On the day, they lost the battle I presume
(I looked away in my childlike squeamishness)
Now, it appears they have one the war,
With their red coats cloaking the memory
Of my earliest home
It is all red now; ants, apartment bricks, Georgia sun
A strong red that pierces through the decades of time
Between now and then. A flashing signal.
An enclosed, protected home, and the silent cry of nature
Washed away.
