Rhythms of Childhood

This is the poem I have to present in the poetry workshop tomorrow.  Stanzas and editing!  A step forward in sophistication, if not very tentatively.  I think I'll have to learn to write funny poems since so much of my childhood memories are so bleak they even depress me.  Probably the case with many artists and poets, too much dark material!  I'll only post the final poems instead of the stuff I work on during the week so I will keep to the daily short stuff that has been the basis of this blog.  Thanks for reading!

We lived north of Gary, Indiana;

city of smokestacks belching dark

plumes by day, by night, the sickly yellow 

luminescence of flickering sodium lights.

Weekends we drove north to visit Dad,

my sister pocketed the gas money from Mom.

Dad had black friends; he didn’t last long in Cicero.

Us kids all slept upstairs in a cold room

on a dirty linoleum floor huddled together

unwillingly, in the early morning light

dressing to go back to Mom’s, we carefully

shielding our eyes from witnessing

our emergence from childhood.

My sister and I so wished to have our own room

with a bunkbed and two flashlights, a door

that locked from the inside, that we would

open only when light filtered through the curtain

that parted as we opened the slightly

dented, steel cabinet looking for cereal

on the shelf above the Southern Comfort.