A Poem by Richard Allen Taylor

Richard Allen Taylor
author of
"The Next Generation of Mourning"

Eric sent this poem to me on Sunday.

He heard it on the radio and typed it out, and sent it to my kids and their spouses.

He does this about once a month.

I tell him to stop it, that I hate poetry. Here is the poem from this week.

Poignant.


The Next Generation of Mourning

I have begun, like my mother before me,
to cross out names. She lived to read the obituaries
of all her friends. In my generation, the first girl
I ever kissed is dead, complications of pneumonia.
I saw the email on the way from something
important to something suddenly not, and felt
nothing, as if a high-powered bullet had passed
through me without hitting heart or head or bone.
Later: the ache as I remembered
when we were 16, in a state
of mutual crush, and rode to the lake—
that parent-approved, church-sponsored
alternative to a real beach trip
with tiki bars and carnal temptations—
and made out in the back seat of a red ’64
Chevy Impala with Ray driving and Mable
looking back now and then to wink and grin.
Soon the romance was over and we moved on,
but never forgot that date, and when
I saw her forty years later we still joked
and smiled about that ride and wondered
whatever happened to Ray and Mable.

-Richard Allen Taylor

——

Something in the poem made me pensive. It was the title, I think, and the Chevy Impala and the fact that the voice was male.

I wanted to tell what that girl was thinking in the car … her first kiss and all. And I thought that girl was going to be me that I was going to tell about in my poem.. But then something happened that happens to me often. I start to write something and it ends up being something else. So the poem I was going to write was "My first Kiss"

Instead this poem turned out to be

The first woman I ever heard say she wouldn’t mind having a second wife

I looked at her as she entered
the church for Sunday School,
the same faded print dress
Sunday after Sunday.

I knew she had 9 children.

The slow slouch of her shoulders,
the skin on both hands cracked ,
worn with work … and work…
and work….

Her nails, always with dirt from gardening
lodged in the crevices
around the moons of her fingers

And those were the only
words I ever heard her utter.