Tag: Memorial Day

Leaving the Music Behind by Yvonne Morris

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Leaving the Music Behind

On occasional Saturdays, my father made pancakes
the size of dinner plates. Sometimes, he’d take down
a harmonica from the kitchen cabinet, play a perky tune
and bounce along to its jittery notes. A break for him
from his workweek at the glass factory. I asked him
on one such morning where the harmonica had come
from as my mother stood nearby. Her eyes narrowed
and her voice barbed, she answered for him. He took it
from an abandoned house in Germany during the war.
Dad’s face shifted into shadow. In that moment, I pictured
another family gathered, listening to a song I didn’t recognize
but knew. I wondered where they were now. Where had they
gone, leaving the music behind?

*

Yvonne Morris’ poetry has appeared in Beach Chair, Eclectica, ONE ART, The Galway Review, The Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. She is the author of Busy Being Eve (Bass Clef Books) and Mother was a Sweater Girl (The Heartland Review Press). She lives in Kentucky.

The Red Piano by Barbara Daniels

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The Red Piano

Something rattles the windowpanes,
flings noisy bursts of gold, red, gold.
I can’t tell gunfire from fireworks.

At a bar, my friend Al lived through
armed robbery, no problem he thought.
Sirens veer into my neighborhood,

amping my heartbeat. But what I hear
as emergency is only the township’s Santa
waving from a slow-moving firetruck.

One year Al set off New Year’s explosions
in our backyard. I have old photographs—
a drink in Al’s hand, his wife Jeanne and me

in our fluffy hairdos, the men not gray yet,
not really. The neighbor who bragged
about guns moved away, leaving his son

and a rotating team of girlfriends.
Another neighbor had her dog
on a leash when a car hit and killed it.

In his last year, Al climbed to the roof
to clean gutters. Let’s go to Paris,
he said then. Perhaps if I kneel and press

my ear to a heating vent, I’ll hear
the old red piano, everyone singing,
toasting, the only explosion our laughter.

*

Barbara Daniels’ Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas. She also wrote Rose Fever and four chapbooks: Moon Kitchen, Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and The Woman Who Tries to Believe. Her poems have appeared in Good River Review, Book of Matches, Neologism, Rust & Moth, Lake, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere.
She received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Market Day by Karly Randolph Pitman

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Market Day

On market day
my father unfolds himself
inside his plaid coat
and his black ball cap.
Vietnam Veteran, it spells
across the brim
dotted with army pins and buttons.

We walk the stalls. The fruit
vendor offers a slice of
orange and he takes me to the
deli that makes his favorite
sandwich. He’s interrupted in line
by a stranger’s handshake:
“Thank you for your service.”
My father nods and replies,
twice, “Thank you.”

Sometimes a man will bound up
and grasp his elbow, forearm
to forearm. He smiles wide and finds my
father’s eyes – “Welcome home, brother!”

I was born after my father’s war.
It was not his war, either.
Was it anyone’s? Yet he went.
He arrived in country in November.
When he returned the following year
his mother’s hair had turned white.

On the flight home, in his battle fatigues,
the other passengers ask
to be moved to another part of the
plane. Each trip to the market
he gets back on that plane.
Fifty-three years later, the
passengers have returned
to their seats. They see
the uniform and see what he saw,
now buried deep: “Thank you
for your service.”

Another piece of him returns.
His mother’s hair turns grey,
then ash, then brown:
radiant, alive.

*

Karly Randolph Pitman is the founder and steward of Growing Humankindness, a soul sangha of the heart. She’s a mother and mental health advocate, wonderer and writer, teacher and craftswoman who does as much as possible with her hands. She lives in Austin, Texas where she walks among gnarled oak trees and tends her ancestors, those kin of family and community. Through each trip to the underworld, she remains in awe of the human heart.