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Cape Canaveral’s Pioneers Asleep
I wonder if the lights across lagoon
Waves, little though they are, the lights and waves,
Portend some goodness underneath the moon
Like new moon light on marble architraves.
The houses on the shores send out their light.
Canaveral’s lagoon holds little dreams
Much smaller than the brains of sting rays, slight
As brains of horseshoe crabs beneath the beams
From windows in the white frame buildings sent
Across the water. Dreaming in the beds
Inside the bedrooms does not bear the scent
Of Atlas missiles in the sleeping heads.
_No scenes from orbiting space telescopes
__Invaded pioneering dreams with hopes.
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Aunt Wilma’s and Aunt Ruth’s
Mother Not Even Worth a Yawn
Forgotten ones are lost in and stare out
From sepia. They do not matter, not
At all. The photo albums almost shout
The nothingness of these, their silent nought.
Their children and their children leave them trapped
In volumes almost never opened. There
These unremembered ones continue rapt
In darkness till a child lets in the glare
Of now, its ruthless light. The child asks, “Who
Are they?” and no one knows, or if they know
They say, “That’s Woodrow’s father, married to
That woman, Wilma’s mother, long ago.”
_And that is all the kiddie gets because
__That’s it. The page is turned without a pause.
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Phillip Whidden is an American living in England who has been published in America, England, Scotland (and elsewhere) in book form, online, and in journals.
These are distinctive, both in focus and technique. The 2nd in particular spoke to me. As a former librarian in possession of a mass of old family photos (some placed in albums and carefully captioned, others loose and originally lacking any data), of correspondence, writings (fiction and nf) of a grandfather who died more than 20 years before my birth, I am anxious to make these people (as well as my wife and myself) at least minimally knowable to my children and grandchildren (the youngest 2 of whom, just born, are 76 years my juniors). So far, though, my efforts as family archivist and historian take 2nd place to producing poetry and fiction, to reading, and of course to visiting with family. But it would be good not to let the past in my possession slip away altogether.
Thanks for both of these.
Thank you very much, Julian D. Woodruff. I’m glad the second one particularly touched a nerve. I have remarked to many people that family photo albums without labelling on the pics are at best tantalizing, and at worst…well, I’ll let you fill in the ellipsis dots. I never knew that that photo of my father’s father with his first wife (not my grandmother) even existed until I went to the Golden Wedding Anniversary celebration of one of my brothers and his wife … and then his daughter unearthed it. No one at the huge family celebration knew the name of the woman. It was assumed she was the mother of my father’s father’s two eldest daughters (half sisters of my father). Among everything, sorrow is everywhere, Mr. Woodruff. For what it’s worth, my opinion is that your writing and poetry are far more important for your descendants than are pics of you. Keep the balance right. Here’s a bit of humor for you. By the time my father (a pioneer with his father on the Cape) was born, his father was so thrilled to have a male child after a string of female babies only that although he bestowed a grandiose name on him, the boy was never called by that name. He was always called Man.
I am always fascinated with comparing present circumstances to the past. Before modern conveniences, nature was the only outside entertainment. In many ways that was a time conducive to inner reflection on the gifts God gave us to consider the wonders and deepen appreciation for living. I am the keeper of family albums and memories. Fortunately, my mother labeled everything and everyone in photo albums. These are two poems that conjure up the thoughts and visions in my mind.
Thank you, Roy Eugene Peterson. I’m glad the sonnets worked for you…probably even reminding you of your mother (Blessings on her). Others of my sonnets about my Cape Canaveral forebears often refer achingly to the nature that surrounded them. And, yes, that nature was important to them. Let me give you an instance. One of my father’s half-sisters was Wilma. She had a glorious voice. (I have subsequently become an opera buff; no surprise there, eh?) She was the belle of the communities on either side of the Banana River (a lagoon separating the Cape from the mainland). Of an evening, my father would row her out onto the lagoon and she would sing. The water carried her amazing voice up and down and across their little world–and suddenly it was not so little then. When she sang “The Holy City” in my tiny, white-concrete-block-childhood church, everyone, EVERYONE was carried on the wings of the seraphim to a place levitating above the throne of God and Christ.
Thank you for your further assistance in understanding the background for your poem. My mother was much like your mother who could hit high C and sustain it. She was in the annual Passion Play one year in Spearfish, South Dakota, before marrying my dad. I inherited a voice that imitated almost exactly the rock and roll/country singers of the 1950’s and 1960′. I always wondered why she never attempted to become a star. Now I am at the same stage wondering why I never did either.
Phillip, I had thought my father was a Cape Canaveral pioneer, being hired by Pan American Airways in the 1950s to do some of the first construction on the space port. Glad to hear your imagination about the untroubled dreams of earlier pioneers. I myself recall white frame buildings, horseshoe crabs, and the Banana River. Keep up labeling those important albums.
Hello, Margaret Coats. It’s good we both share a Cape Canaveral heritage with you. Yes, most of this creation in this sonnet is entirely imagined. How could it be otherwise? By the time I was a very, very young boy in the early 1950s, my father’s father was very elderly. I have no memory of his trying to talk with me, much less sharing his past or dreams with me. You definitely have some of the old-timey images from that now somewhat distant time in your brain. Good. My older brother’s daughter is the one doing the work on the family photo albums now, not me.