“It’s what kids once learned a long time ago. . .what this nation
was founded on--morality, memorization of poetry, learning to read aloud, to do arithmetic, and to do what literate people do in society.”—Marva Collins**
“I still don’t see why anyone would ever
read a poem,”
the young man, student, told us on TV.
Answers came lame, and all the wrong
protesting ones.
I would have said, why, one would read a poem
for the reason you might watch a cat—
its grace notes curling, stretching, those
little hairs, sunburst
on haunches, stone-lion-crouched,
the quivering intelligent tail, the eyes,
marble-miraculous gleaming.
“But what’s the use of it?”
No use. No use in tapping your foot in time
to tunes,
or driving along, car windows down, wind in your
hair,
and the smell of river bottoms and plowed fields,
or even fertilizer.
You’d read a poem to delight the ear and eye,
for something to wonder about,
to take a moment out, to touch what’s real
that you don’t have to; watching flocks
of small birds wheeling
on sluices of the air we breathe,
or hawk or eagle, plummeting,
or motionless aloft on that same air.
To put a frame around this moment, tape it down
and get a handle on it.
Like stroking that sweet feline in your lap.
— Harriet Stovall Kelley
read a poem,”
the young man, student, told us on TV.
Answers came lame, and all the wrong
protesting ones.
I would have said, why, one would read a poem
for the reason you might watch a cat—
its grace notes curling, stretching, those
little hairs, sunburst
on haunches, stone-lion-crouched,
the quivering intelligent tail, the eyes,
marble-miraculous gleaming.
“But what’s the use of it?”
No use. No use in tapping your foot in time
to tunes,
or driving along, car windows down, wind in your
hair,
and the smell of river bottoms and plowed fields,
or even fertilizer.
You’d read a poem to delight the ear and eye,
for something to wonder about,
to take a moment out, to touch what’s real
that you don’t have to; watching flocks
of small birds wheeling
on sluices of the air we breathe,
or hawk or eagle, plummeting,
or motionless aloft on that same air.
To put a frame around this moment, tape it down
and get a handle on it.
Like stroking that sweet feline in your lap.
— Harriet Stovall Kelley
1933 - 2022
** protégé of Eugene Lang, who promised college to ghetto kids finishing high school
Note from poet ~
My mother, Evelyn Linch Stovall (1904-1962) wrote a textbook, You and your Reading for Ginn & Co, 1940, as an outgrowth of her Master’s work at Emory. In it my father has a poem, “Mr. Propaganda.” But my two younger sisters turned out to be musicians, so bookish is not inherited, necessarily, just “bent.”
Note from poet ~
My mother, Evelyn Linch Stovall (1904-1962) wrote a textbook, You and your Reading for Ginn & Co, 1940, as an outgrowth of her Master’s work at Emory. In it my father has a poem, “Mr. Propaganda.” But my two younger sisters turned out to be musicians, so bookish is not inherited, necessarily, just “bent.”
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