It is not a season

It is not a season but a memory,

or nest of memories, of day camp

and Bible school, hot sand on hot beaches,

sunburns, snowball stands, and sloshing

hot coffee or cold milk with hot doughnuts

and listening to jazz, always there

especially when no one was playing,

even too young to know it was jazz.

It is not a season but Saturday matinees,

sitting in the dark cool and watching

badly acted Italian movies with English subtitles,

or taking the bus into town with mother

for shopping and a movie and (if I was lucky)

a ride on the streetcar.

It is not a season but falling asleep

to the sound of the attic fan, upper lip

washed lightly in sweat, or a week

at grandmother’s house and tooling

around in a slightly newer than Model T Ford,

or with the aunt in the Ninth Ward

with a front yard called the levee

of the Industrial Canal.

It is not a season but candy

at small grocery stores and R.C. Colas

with peanuts in the bottom and Moon Pies

whose chocolate melted on your fingers

and homemade ice cream at church socials.

It is not a season but it was all real,

helping construct a child and a childhood,

and now it resides, quietly,

in the mirage of memory.

Over at dVerse Poets, today, the prompt is about summer and heat and mirages. To see what others have done, please visit dVerse Poets.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The corn died this summer

The corn died first, then

the soybeans, thirsting for the rain

that didn’t come. Farmers watched

the early morning, noon, 5, 6 and 10

o’clock news knowing that nothing

was changing except hope.

And occupying my postage stamp

of a yard I scurried from grass

to gardens to trees to grass and

back again, a perpetual etcetera

of water and hoses, sprinklers

and soakers, and constant motion

of water and hope.

The red buds died in the boulevards

this summer, and the Civil War tree

in the park, three of my rosebushes

but only one limb of the crabapple.

Hope endures.

This poem is submitted to the dVersePoets prompt of the dog days of summer. To see other poems, please visit the site.

Sunday afternoons, summer

North Louisiana summer hot

hot on a Sunday afternoon, 4 p.m.,

and we would walk the short block

to the red-brick church, the open field

behind it, to the prize all eyes

turned to, the white-painted

cinder block building for

the lawn mowers, the mowers

removed to make space for

the tables of ice cream, homemade,

ice cream swirling in ice and

hands still turning the cranks and

pouring the salt, with every flavor

that could be imagined but I went

straight to the vanilla, and we’d run

across the open field behind

the church, clutching our bowls

of ice cream, hoping all the while

they wouldn’t remember if we crept

back into line for seconds.


This is another in the series of poems on growing up int he South, suggested by my friend Nancy Rosback.