Not Nothing To The Crows

This is a picture of my father, Jack Hicks Hopper, 
and his older sister, Mary Lillian Hopper taken, 
I think, at the time of their train journey from Portales, New Mexico 
back to Arkansas where their parents had met and married. 
They went to visit relatives. Just before I died, 
Dad told me a memory of this train journey. 
The porter locked the doors of the restrooms when the train was in a station 
so freeloaders couldn't hide and avoid being asked for a ticket. 
isOnce, the little boy in the picture above happened to be inside 
when the door got locked and he was very frightened! 
More than seventy years later, he told me this story,  
just a few months before he died. 
I heard only a few stories of his early life from my father. 

My mother took up most of the air time...

A new issue of POETRY MAGAZINE came this week. I opened the first page to see if I had heard  of any of the poets. The Table of Contents is in the order of the magazine which follows. And the very first poem is by my friend, Lucia Perillo. I met her in the early 1980s in Bob Hass's poetry seminar at San Jose State. 
Afterwards, she went to Syracuse for a graduate degree
 in writing. I went to her wedding in Olympia, Washington,

Her books are terrific!

She has been dead now for just a little more than two years. She left us October 16, 2016.  At that time I had two unfinished letters to her on my desktop. They are still there. Unfinished, never sent or read. Consider this your wake-up call to finish any unfinished letters-in-progress!  

There is a good article in Wikipedia, which lists her publications and awards, which are plentiful. It is worth your while to get any of her eight books, which are all still available. Mostly books of poems, but also a book of stories and an autobiographical work, much of it concerning her life as a person with multiple sclerosis.

Here is Lucia's poem from Poetry, November, 2018 97, page 97.

                      Say This

I live a small life, barely bigger than a speck,
barely more than a blip on the radar sweep
through it is not nothing, as the garter snake
climbs the rock rose shrub and the squirrel creeps
on bramble thorns. Not nothing to the crows
who heckle from the crowns of the last light's trees
winterstripped of green, except for the boles
that ivy winds each hour round. See, the world is busy
and the world is quick, barely time for a spider
to suck the juice from w hawk moth's head
so it can use the moth a a spindle that it wraps in fiber
while the moth constricts until it's thin as a stick
you might think was nothing, a random bit
caught in a web coming loose from the window frame, in wind.

Lucia Perillo

Finding this poem has triggered me to start blogging again.
I hope to post something every day. See you later!!