Sputterpub's Blog

     I found this in the old poetry folder. I was 16 when I wrote it. I was starting my senior year of high school. The Summer of Love would come right after graduation.

I remember that I composed it as a song, although I had no melody in mind.

“Peace!” the children bleated,
Brandishing punning pens.
I watched as they sang out a slogan.
I saw their identical grins.
They paired off and spun round in circles,
Then regrouped and shouted out “Love!”
And drawing their circle together,
They bowed to the wing of a dove.

“Peace!” they exchanged as they parted.
Their mothers were calling them home.
The pinwheel of streets stirred in motion
As every one ran off alone.
I witnessed the night’s quiet lifetime,
The stars spun their dances above.
But the children, alone and too timid,
Dared not even whisper out “Love!”

“Peace!” crowed the children at daybreak,
Lynching the frightening night.
They baptized the sun with their smiles
And rolled in the comfort of light.
They talked in their circles for hours,
They banished the nights they had feared,
And, looking at only each other,
Sang “Love!” till the sun disappeared.

     When I was 43 I backpacked for the last time. I’m sure of that, because the highlight of the trip was its ending. I would have paid a hundred times what I did for that hot shower.

Not that the trip wasn’t wonderful. There’s no denying that the way to get away from other people is to walk places where vehicles can’t go, and the gear is getting lighter and smarter every season. It’s simply that this comfort-seeking nester had outgrown the sport.

I could no longer achieve good rest on the ground. I was never okay without a toilet. I loathe mosquitos. I became so uncomfortable, trudging bent forward with that frame on my back, sweating in an almost sick way, that I had to restrain myself from throwing tantrum-like fits of irritability.

I have camped since, and I intend to again. I have slept in Humphrey’s Basin, but a mule carried my stuff in. I have enjoyed the eastern Sierras and some amazing nights in Death Valley, but we had wood and water in a pickup truck and we checked into a motel at least every third night. I’m not quite as stern as my mother, who says she won’t camp anywhere that doesn’t have an escalator, but I’m getting there.

That last backpack trip had fine moments I want to keep. There was a morning I rose alone and left the tent and perched on a big rock in the middle of a meadow. I felt like the only person in the world as I watched the rising sunlight sweep the valley.

And there was that final night, after Mike retired, when I sat with the campfire until it slept too. I started a sonnet about that fire then, and I think it’s just about fully baked now:

A crater pulses glowing at my feet
as if I were a goddess in control
of lava moving maggot-like in heat
and colors ribboning within its bowl.
As if Hephaestus mixed a soup for me
and brought it in a cauldron made of earth,
I stoop to sample radiance and see
the syrup of volcanic afterbirth.

The scarlet and the gold erupt in bright
calligraphy and then subside to black,
until I breathe on them and blow them light
again, and coax the searing color back,
until at last I let them cool and fade
and slumber, under night’s encasing shade.

I got into the footlocker recently, and found a tattered folder titled “My Poetry.” It contains the first poem I remember writing (published in my third post in this blog, last July) and I smiled to read that I remembered every word just the way I wrote it. According to the folder, it was composed the Halloween when I was 7 (1957) instead of the “6 or so” I guessed when I put up the post. I see that I was writing in cursive. However, the other side of the lined paper has a piece called “Our World’s Beginning” that carries a date of Feb. 4, 1959, so perhaps the dates are when I penciled the words on these pages, and not a record of original composition. I see that I illustrated the page with a dancer and an astronomical scene. I see that I misspelled the most important word of it: the title and first line contain “Balleriner.”

The third poem in the folder is delighting me today. The title is “Mr. Copper Penny And Miss Lady Dime,” and the date is April 25, 1959. That was the spring after we moved to California. I was newly placed in fourth grade. I wonder if I was into Robert Service then. Maybe. I remember reading “The Ballad of Lenin’s Tomb” to my class a year later so it’s possible I was already under his narrative influence.

Mr. Copper Penny And Miss Lady Dime

Once upon a time
There lived a copper penny
Whose owner’s name
Was Mr. Denny.

One day Mr. Denny
Spent his shiny copper penny
On a present for his
Little baby boy.

Out went the register.
In went the penny.
Out came a toy,
Held by Mr. Denny.

But who was in the register?
Why little Lady Dime.
And what did Penny say to her?
He said, “Will you be mine?”
Lady Dime said, “Yes.”
That’s the end of this rhyme.