Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry
Poetry of the People
“Buckshot guesswork,” he said,
as pulsar dust fell on hay bales
and he chewed on his cigarillo.
He took the beat up guitar,
the one his daddy played, from
the corner and broke into
a Hank Williams number.
Another followed – strange,
Almost malevolent in the half-light,
as though pale shadows of
ghosts –
I was looking for a certain book of poetry in my shelves and found my mom’s old autograph book from when she was in junior high, 1953-55. Here are some of the quite poetic inscriptions inside:
When you get married, don’t marry a fool. Marry a boy from Locust High School.
If I was a little pig playing in the yard and you were a little dog, would you bite me very hard?
I love you little. I love you big. I love you like a little pig.
When you get married and live on a hill, send me a piece of your wedding cake by a whippoorwill.
Nestled mid twinkling
Lights, artificial nature
Captures her beauty.
–Kelly Palmer
The sewing needle rests next to my eighth
vertebrate. I cannot feel it but know
it is there. The thread circles my kidneys
like amber capillaries. A sloping
row of real pearl buttons, tiny full moons,
bump into my small intestine. Silk blocks
wrap the ligaments of my arms, as if
my bones are on fire and must be bandaged
by something cool. A piece of lace crumpled
into a triangle lines my womb. All
that I am, all of my tools and notions,
I have swallowed and absorbed. I now leave
their world. I open the door to the night
and drink my thimbles before I run out.
–Shaun Perkins
(Tam Lin)
Somewhere in the middle of his vast, joyous, brutal, democratic, and American poem, Walt Whitman said:
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me;
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.
We are all here together for a time on this planet, and our lives affect each other. Facebook is the ubiquitous example of that. What we say, what we do, what we post, how we respond, how we don’t respond: these all illustrate our inescapably interwoven lives.
Old Walt’s poetry was a song for the removal of barriers between people, no matter how different, evil, good, hopeless, or rotten. He believed in the essential goodness of humans, yet was not surprised when he didn’t always find it.
To be in love with the world and unsurprised by its brutality at the same time . . . that is my wish for us all. Unscrew the locks from your doors and your hearts and see what happens.
Cold, damp, air gushes
Through pet window. Crunchy leaves
Swirl on concrete floor.
–Kelly Palmer
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 