Behind Prejudice

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The few black men I ever saw
in my childhood were these:

men behind counters, mops, or mowers
in aprons or dungarees;

in darkness behind the gaping windows
where, driving, we locked our doors;

on TV, muscles gleaming behind
white coaches or explorers;

Cosby and Satchmo, behind wide smiles,
their comic drawls and whoops;

behind beleagured Doctor King,
men hurling bricks at cops.

So when a dred-locked thickset man
in shorts behind a stroller

grinned to see, toddling ahead,
his giggling little daughter,

behind what segregation taught me--
like bulls, they're docile or mad--

I confess I felt surprise that he
was just like a regular dad.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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Prejudice needn't include animus to be unjust.

One pleasure of writing is to discover things in the process that you didn't have in mind when you started. I thought I might find a poem in a list of all the black men I encountered in childhood, both in person and in media. There were so few. When I noticed that several had stood "behind" things, I made a rule to include "behind" in every clause. Then I got the idea to update my experiences, and, naturally, the young father walked "behind" the stroller. But there was no "behind" in the final clause about the white viewer. I took several drafts to realize that the white viewer himself is behind a screen that distorts his vision. - WSS

Did God Have Your Back?

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With a screech of tires and a crunch,
a Beamer rammed me off the road.

Still the engine hummed, the radio played,
the dashboard dials still glowed green,

but upside-down. My car and I had flipped!
Then, as a key turns in a lock,

the dials realigned. I laughed to learn
the turnaround was in my mind.

Not so the broken bones: I couldn't walk
for weeks. So, no, I don't believe

that God was in the crash, nor in the fact
I kept my spine intact, and my life.

But when I saw the dash turn up from under,
God was in the wonder -- and the laugh.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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A priest with a psychology degree taught me that we -- people and peoples -- retell our stories until we get them right. I've retold this one many times, always wondering what question my subconscious mind was trying to answer. I think at last I've found it.

This final draft is a return to what I wrote first. Several other drafts culminated in seven couplets that rhymed perfectly. But each end rhyme seemed to stop the story. Reading it, even I lost the thread. In a new draft, I avoided end rhyme but inserted rhymes from the earlier draft wherever they fit naturally. As internal rhymes, they add momentum and connection.

I read in Linda Pastan's poetry collection Insomnia this week some advice to poets that helped me to polish each couplet as a pearl in a necklace. - WSS

We Sing a Song of the Choir of Paul (hymn parody)

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original lyric “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God” by Lesbia Scott, b. 1898
Episcopal Hymnbook 1982 #293

Following a year finding ways to make music under COVID restrictions, the choir sings to interim director Paul Kelley on the eve of a well-deserved vacation.

1. We sing because we’re the choir of Paul,
patient, and brave, and few.
To take off our masks and to get off line,
we did what you said to do.
We sang in the balcony, sang in the hall,
and we sang in procession though it was small,
and we even came in for a nine o’ clock call
and stayed for the postlude, too.

2. Now hymns are out and the masks are in.
We’re socially distanced, too.
You’ve got your chance to escape to France,
so we come to bid adieu
to a full-time organist, full-time veep,
and a full-time father who needs some sleep,
but while you’re away, all we, li-ike sheep,
will be on Zoom missing you.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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On Easter Sunday, our part-time interim choir director Paul fortified our choir with paid guest singers and a professional trumpet player. For the best-attended service we've had since April of 2019, the music was grand and moving -- tearing up, I had to stop singing the anthem. This makes a good time to post a tribute to Paul while I work on new material.

Sung to Paul at a bon-voyage party last year, my lyric is a parody of a children's song, but it's an accurate account of painful experience. For more than a year of COVID, group singing was impossible, and membership in the choir eroded, though we tried to keep interest up through social gatherings on Zoom. During that time, when clergy live-streamed services from the empty nave of St. James, Paul invited Lanie, Leslie, or me to sing hymn tunes. To comply with COVID directives, we either wore a mask or isolated ourselves in the hall or the balcony.

During the summer of 2021, choir started up again, but Delta and then Omicron hit. For a time, every adult I knew had a case in their immediate family. It was then that Paul took his grown son on a long-postponed trip to France. - WSS

Coming Soon

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In a world
where power is arbitrary -- cut
to head on a platter --

one man stands for love and justice --
"Many who are first shall be last" --
Did I say he's on a donkey? --"and last first."

Cut to old actor you'd know, English,
"They called him king?" "Sir, and worse --
'The son of God.'" A close up, worried eyes.

He wagers all he has on one -- last -- supper.
Snippets of guests: "'The honor of your presence' -- it's for Passover!"
"But, where?" "Just 'follow a man with a jar.'" "Is it a game?"

Everyone is hiding something. "I know
you're with the underground." "He's a collaborator?"
"Scandalous. They should have stoned her."

--and murder is on the table.
"One of you will betray me." Huge outcry.
"Which one?" "Who is it?" "Is it I?"

Exterior, dark, torches, screams.
This tough guy actor pulls a sword, cut
to title card The Last Supper.

I'm thinking, do we really need another remake?
Then the tag line: The greatest mystery is yet to come.
Sunrise, woman, closeup, crying. A shadow falls.

"Mary."
Goosebumps!
Want to see it?

Image by Susan Rouse.
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Since I read Murder on the Orient Express in the early 1970s, I've seen three different film versions. In all three, the excitement builds as those characters board the fatal train. That's true of other whodunnits with star-studded casts who take a cruise or return for a family reunion.

As we approach Holy Week, when the church ritually reenacts the last seven days in the life of Jesus, I've wondered if a shift of genre might reveal something in the story, or, maybe just in me.

"Mary" in the final stanza is not the woman whom Jesus saved from stoning, though they are often treated as one. I chose not to make the distinction clear for my sensationalized gospel. For details, see my blog post for Mary Magdalene Day. - WSS

Etymology of Abundance

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I came that [the sheep] might have life and have it abundantly. John 10.9-10

To live abundantly:

Is it ab-, "away," as in abnormal,
with unda, as in undulation, wave,
a once-in-a-lifetime tsunami,
overflowing shorelines, fences, streets,
obliterating boundaries

creating wilderness
as in, the Shepherd's forty days
a-, "not" bound to family, synagogue, carpentry,
when he refused both wealth and power.
He gathered a flock to heal the world
without a cent, a change of clothes, or plan.

Or can it mean "jump,"
with a- for "at" as in aloud, astir,
my dog sends squirrels abounding to trees,
rounding her backyard boundaries.
She then bounds up the stairs to me,
undulating tongue to tail.

Surely "dance" is in the answer
as in this grateful abundancer.

Image by Susan Rouse.
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When a seventh grader asked why we spent so much time on vocabulary in a class called 'Literature,' I answered that almost every substantial word is a short poem, rooted in an image or a metaphor.

Sometimes, my own theories for words' origins are better than what the dictionary tells me, so this may be the first in a series of etymythologies. - WSS