I am recently retired to the Traverse City area after an eclectic career of part time teaching, antiques dealing, and volunteering with the homeless in Phoenix, Arizona. I have been married to a wonderful man for the past thirty-seven years, am an avid gardener, amateur photographer, great cook, and reader and writer of poetry.
THE DEER
What woman does not recognize
the deer?
They come, single file now
along the worn path,
like cows drawn home at
milking time.
Near the feeding ground, they
fan out,
swirling, all stick legged,
sneer faced,
ears flattened, raised on hind
legs,
like female gang members,
coming down
hard on smaller, weaker
subordinates.
They gobble, grab, and gulp
mouthfuls of corn.
The yearlings still follow
their mothers,
bulging now with unborn fawns,
only two months from spring
foaling.
Now, with winter nearing it’s
end,
from snow filled swamp, cedars
browsed
beyond reach, their fear
tempered by driving hunger,
they “yard up” to the hearths
of humankind.
Which one of us has not done the
same?
Fed from the enemy’s
plate.
Slept in his bed to safeguard
food
and shelter for our
children.
Fought for position and
status.
Begged in welfare lines.
Endured blows from the
aggressor,
with nowhere to turn,
bowed in humiliating
submission.
What woman does not recognize
the deer?
FIRST MEMORY
For my grandmother,
For my grandmother,
Martha Otillia Preuss Liske (1910-1985)
Blinding light, your voice calling
my name from within
a dark
rectangular shape.
You stood inside the shaded porch,
your box camera in hand
capturing, imprinting,
that small child you loved,
in the brightness of day.
Hidden,
as you are from me now,
returned again beyond that darkened door,
I stand alone in the light,
calling your name.
SHAME
I see through my window past
snow covered pines into a winter
my father was self-employed.
He and my mother, down in the swamp
cutting cedar pulp for the mill in town.
“It was a shame,” my mother sighed,
“your Dad drank up all the money.”
Drunk, or on his way to getting drunk,
unemployed or marginally employed,
he blew any good job he managed to get.
Hung over, he drank his cup of shame,
smoking a Pall Mall held cocked,
coquettish, trembling over crossed legs,
ankle swaying and curled like a girls,
hiding his shame even from himself.
Holding his cup on his knee,
he blew smoke rings to amuse us.
“Think maybe I'll go see Ed about
that part for the car,” he mumbled,
voice soft, dumbed with shame.
He'd come home after the bar closed
words slurred, laughing, barely erect, an alien
changeling from another world, shame numbed
for the moment in
Pabst Blue Ribbon
and Jim Beam, passing out on the couch.
Desperate with shame, my mother gathered
his discarded beer bottles from around
the yard and barns, several bushel baskets,
a confrontation met with rage and broken glass,
shame smashed against the wall behind which I slept.
Two months after I last saw him, my father
died of kidney failure and cirrhosis. He was
sixty-three years old, lived in a rented shack,
with only his clothes and his last Social Security
check to his name. It
was a real shame.
~Sylvia McCullough
