Open Link Night is today, Thursday over at dversepoets.com. It’s a great night to read poems that are all over the place…not demanded forms, etc. My friend, Kanzan Sakura has pushed me to submit this poem below to OLN. We will see how it flies….
Lady Nyo
This childhood boy has been on my mind for years. Way before I became a poet. I hope that Johnny is well and has a wonderful life. We certainly did what we could to make him miserable. Forgive us, Johnny.
Johnny Muttner
He would come down the school bus aisle,
An early morning scowl on his face
His right leg dragging
And we would advert our eyes or giggle.
No one knew for sure
What was wrong with Johnny
But an adult said
“Maybe a club foot”
And we went through our poor knowledge
Of the word club to figure this out.
Country club, caveman’s club, club soda
That was about the full of it.
Johnny was a farm boy,
And wore the rough overalls to school.
That, paired with the strange, heavy shoes
Was sure to isolate him from our mainstream.
And our ‘mainstream’ were other farm kids,
But without the limp.
Every so often, a boy would get caught in a bailer
And die or be maimed
So perhaps this was the fate of Johnny
But no one really knew
And no one had the courage to ask.
This was the time of polio
Of Iron Lungs
Of cripples and crutches
And non-motorized wheelchairs
So why did Johnny get treated
By us this way?
Because he was amongst us,
Our age, a farm boy like the rest of us.
Our fathers came home not long before
From War, with the embellishments of combat
Physical and psychological
But this was too close to home, our generation
And not our father’s.
The scowl on his face
And the fact that
No one on the school bus would make room
Meant he suffered the full blows
Of childhood brutality.
Who knows what he suffered at home.
There is a time, in childhood
When children are compassionate
When they surround with concern
A child thrown off a swing, or with skinned knees
Or a cast on an arm that we all clamber to sign,
But at a set stage, all this changes; we become brutes
Like many of the rural parents we saw and knew
Our own parents who would shoot a stray dog
Or cut the throat of a lamb
And don’t ask what they did to cats.
So we became imitation adults
The worse of us
And Johnny suffered our transformations
From childhood to an early mean adulthood.
It wasn’t until high school
That Johnny changed and we girls
Noticed the change.
He became handsome, talkative
Almost a different boy, winsome
And he stood tall and no one
Noticed the limp anymore.
Perhaps he had learned to hide it.
60 years later I remember him,
He floats before my eyes
Of a time faded into nothingness
Mostly I remember the cruelties
That this lamb suffered
At the hands of children
Growing into life
And a mean, unavoidable destiny.
–
-Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2017
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