Issue 11
Summer 2002
Harding Stedler
Six years ago, I retired from teaching at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, OH, after 34 years in the classroom. Today, I work at a local publishing house, designing Language Arts materials for elementary-school youngsters. And, this is my third and final term as secretary of the Poets' Roundtable of Arkansas.
As Professor of English at Shawnee State, where I spent my final seventeen years of teaching, I was a charter member of the South Central Ohio chapter of Phi Delta Kappa, housed at SSU. I also founded and advised The Phoenix Writers, a fraternity of poets at the University. I continue to conduct their fall writers' conference held at Murphin Ridge Inn, in September, in Amish country of Southern Ohio.
WAILING SIRENS AND BLOOD-STAINED PILLOWS
My haste turns to paralyzed anger
as I helplessly watch
the retrieval of casualties:
some conscious, others not;
some alive, then others.
Work traffic home
invites wailing sirens
and traffic at a standstill.
Carnage on the interstate
sobers impatient drivers
in a hurry to eat and run.
I will take these images home
to frame unwanted nightmares
and spend sleep in torment.
My dreams will be stained
with blood
left drying on my pillow
as morning wakes.
THE WORK OF SEMIS
Buzzards swoop from feathered skies
to shred the road-kill.
They feast on breathless possum
and semi-maimed raccoon.
The buzzards' naked heads
give new meaning to ugliness.
I look at them and cringe
as they clutch their prey
with mighty talons,
then pull decomposing flesh apart.
As they scour the roadsides clean,
I do not disparage their frenzied efforts.
In dodging their asphalt buffets,
I permit them to do a service.
KENTUCKY IS MY SPRING
White linen heals the pain
of those entrenched in hardship
if only for two weeks,
when winter recedes.
Hillsides burst in white,
announcing April.
I feel stirrings under ground
as dogwood takes a firmer hold
of barely-covered rock.
Miles of country roads
are wrapped in innocence
in land too poor to till.
In country denied material prosperity,
a natural wealth prevails
and assuages the suffering
of those whose only wage is welfare,
whose only work day labor.
I return to Kentucky in dreams each year
for glimpses of white petticoats
and renewal
that will allow me to harvest rocks
where corn won't sprout in spring.