A Mural For Myself
Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying and other undying music
seemed to take me by the hand to Camelot after injuries caused loss of
memories.
When I was a first grader, I was let out early from school
with other children that ran into the arms of parents with solemn faces. With
no one to pick me up, I quickly learned independence. I walked alongside the
quiet freedom of Saint Mary’s Park, the former estate of The Founding Father
who came up with We, The People. There were no sweet bird songs, no roar of
planes from Idlewood Airport and skies were battleship gray.
With my beloved books, I walked long steps of our home and
past the milk box next to our apartment next to the door of a white –haired
woman, all I had in the way of a doting grandmother. In the living room, I saw
Uncle Walter. He took off his glasses to look back at a clock and marked the
passing of the country’s first TV president in The Space Age.
Super Man died again with a bullet to his head.
In crowds of disbelief and swelling grief, John John
saluted, as did I and other kids. We put up a brave front. It’s what heroes do.
Later on, the better angels of our nature had a dream for the city that never
sleeps and beyond borders like that mechanical wing and a prayer called Voyager
bringing the blues to the universe. “God bless every one of you on the good
green Earth,” said an astronaut after reading the first chapter of Genesis.
“And his mother cried,” softly sang The King over a sick baby born in the
ghetto.
Live long and prosper, Elvis.
You are so cool an American next to John F Kennedy and John
Glenn. The coolest that made the boy I was dance to The Jailhouse Rock in The
South Bronx of America.
It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.
This is for my mother, who worked in a pen & pencil
factory.
She drew me my first smile.
This is for my English teacher who believed I would write
The Next Great American Novel. Just write what you know, she encouraged a six
grader in The Wonder Years.
Easy as ABC and, “3…2…1--- liftoff of Apollo 13!”
No comments:
Post a Comment