Here is the latest installment of Poet’s Corner, presented by the Edmonds-based EPIC Poetry Group.

Pentecost 1970

Outside the old chapel along the eaves
during a hard spring rain
working men–husbands and fathers–uncomfortable in blue suits,
smoke Camels and Lucky Strikes after church.
The only tongues of fire are the cherries
at the tips of their cigarettes held in their thin lips in a tobacco haze.
Both Green Stamps and their souls will remain unredeemed in the end.
They mutter about work to be done on the sabbath
after a 60-hour week with mandatory OT at the mill.
Pentecost counts 50 days past Easter
and the apostles gathered in anticipation.
The unity of mankind in loving kindness
still elusive in 1970 after an endless war and racial hatred.
Woodstock and footprints on the moon mean nothing to these men.
I am in the cherub choir singing notes higher than either of my sisters.
I do not know the meaning of requiem,
but I can fill out the cord of grief.
The old men smile at me sadly
knowing how brief childhood lasts along the river
before it twists in pain.
I was angelic in music only.
As a boy, I was expert at throwing rocks and climbing trees.
I could kill a robin with a stone at fifty paces nine out of ten times.
The old men, broken down too young, feel only the unity of sorrow.
The tower fell just months after their war ended.
They hardly understand each other let alone their wives
who’ve grown haggard on such meager love.
It’s all they’ve got left in the tank,
and it needs to take them to judgment day.
They remember a few phrases from their taciturn immigrant parents–
A table grace and bedtime prayer in Norske, perhaps.
Nostalgic for little farmhouses out on the prairie,
They’ve forgotten the hardness and hunger pangs of their childhoods in the 1930s.
My old man, the only Swede in the bunch, runs the office
pushes the men to give more to the company
and less to their families.
He told me a thousand times as we rode home from church
in his two-tone Cadillac: “Use your brains not your back.”
Strange how I can come back to them through all the decades,
a mute messenger from tomorrow.
I wish a blessing on their sad, empty houses
as the ghosts of Melmont wait outside the abandoned church
coughing out the smoke and phlegm of stained dreams,
unable to find a way out.

James Backstrom

~ ~ ~ ~

Two-Bit Fortune Teller

If I could change things I would–
the cancer deaths and accidents,
the downward pull of alcoholism.
You can’t let it get to you.
I lie about my visions and say, “Maybe—”
But they always come true.

Take Erik Mueller, for one, the bulky boy with an easy laugh,
who won every big game under the mercury vapor
lights of Friday night, rambling down a football field
dedicated to the dead of the First World War.
He was a gung-ho fullback, plowing across the goal line.
Bad luck and a low draft number, he died a Marine in a Saigon brothel,
a jealous knife at the end of a war no one will name anything after.
Back home we all said he deserved better.
But I saw it coming.

Some things healed up well enough given time.
Erik’s ex-fiancé, Wendy, married Matt, a conscientious objector.
He became a high school guidance counselor.
You know the family–three kids who all did well in school.
Five grandchildren. The verdict is still out on two of them.
47 years of good marriage before Matt died of an embolism.
Then there was Marie who should have graduated with the class of ‘83
Ebullient and pretty. First clarinet in the marching band.
She had to give up her only baby whom she never got to name.
Born the summer before her Senior year.
A nice dentist and his childless wife gave the little girl
everything and a pony.
Marie went on to do well in real estate,
and the little girl, they named Jacqueline,
grew up to become a doctor,
an oncologist, in fact, who will actually be the one
to show Marie a shadow on her X-ray.
But I get ahead of myself.
I want to tell you that everything
will be easier for the next generation,
and the generation after that, but I’d be lying.
You know that already.
Unlike their parents and grandparents,
who worked long shifts in the mill,
or cut timber in dark forests,
or farmed desolation in the Dakotas,
their lives hurt with uncertainty–
like driving through a rain so hard
the whole world seems like shattering glass.

James Backstrom

~ ~ ~ ~

The Meter High Club

Let’s twitch here in the sunlit puddle
where the water is settled and clear
and only three inches deep,
but warming nicely in the late morning,
driving us into sweet convulsions.
We are scripted for a miraculous
transformation to go hungry for awhile
but then to grow wings and a needle proboscis
and to fly into the dusk,
harmonizing our buzz with one another.
Who cares if our wings are dirty chitin, webbed in black lines,
like a something broken then badly glued back together.
Ours are not petals of orange and yellow flowers,
caressing the breeze among the lilac blooms.
I don’t care that your body bulges purple
after a guzzle of blood while I drink only nectar.
We are flying in the twilight
and mating on the wing,
a meter above the ground.
We only know ecstasy before the final swat.

James Backstrom

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

James Backstrom is a proud charter member of The Epic Poetry Group which meets the second Tuesday of every month. His poems have appeared in Spindrift, Yours Truly, The English Journal, Poetry Seattle, and the anthology, Sounding on The Salish Sea.