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> "My Water Broke"
JustDaniel
post Sep 10 19, 16:03
Post #1


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From: Southwest New Jersey, USA
Member No.: 6
Real Name: Daniel J Ricketts, Sr.
Writer of: Poetry
Referred By:Lori



"My water broke!"
she cried, as she startled up from dinner
with all us kids at our old round oak table.
I had no clue, but Linda, my oldest sister,
ran across the street to get Lee.

The tall Texan arrived,
striding through the back door,
and helped Mom to his car.
Just as they left, "Hold on 'til tomorrow!"
my insensitive 10-year-old voice cried out
and she disappeared, wrapped in a blanket.

That was on the eve of my eleventh birthday
and my mother of five and (I didn't know)
two miscarriages, headed to Tacoma General.
She did wait, we found out the next morning,
and Art forever became my birthday brother.

Some 40 years later, when Eileen and I
visited Tacoma and my old haunts there,
we dropped in on Lee's wife, Marilyn,
the Over-Watch and Historian
of the old neighborhood.
When I related this tale, it was like
Paul Harvey's "and now the rest of the story"
as she filled in some missing pieces…
of the undercurrents of my life.

"Oh yes," she recounted, "Lee
was back from the hospital
(about a 20 minute trip back then)
in about 25 minutes." This huge man
had been scared to death
that Mom would deliver in his car!
When ER staff picked her up outside,
never getting out of the car, he split!

She went on. Later in the evening
Dad suddenly burst through their back door,
"What did you do to my kids?
They're all at home crying!"
"Marsh," Marilyn interjected,
"your wife is at the hospital
having a baby!"

Marilyn said that he was drunk.
"Drunk?!" I emoted. "When was he ever drunk?"
"Well, he was quite often." I was stunned.
"... and of course, you were off somewhere...
like you always were." she added.
"You'd just disappear, often when
your parents were fighting with each other."
"I always went off somewhere? Really?"

I had only learned the previous day,
from younger brother Chuck over lunch,
that fact about my folks... and more.
He’d told me in response to my question
about what my siblings meant
when they kept saying, "You were just oblivious,"
I asked him to give me an example:

"Well one day, Dad was beating Mom,
and I expected you to do something,
but I turned around, and you'd disappeared.
I took a broom myself and beat him off of her."
"You could never do that to Dad," I replied.
"You'd never get away with it." "Well, I did...
and he never mentioned it again!"
I was shocked about everything he revealed.

Marilyn went on, "The next day
your Dad knocked at our back door.
I opened it, and he peered into the living room
at Lee and told him that he was sorry...
three times, but Lee never answered.
When your Dad asked me why,
I told him that he couldn't."

It seems that they'd been trimming
a sugar cane-like house plant
when Linda frantically came to their door.
Lee left his knife there and rushed off.
When he returned he started stripping
the stems and chewing them, as he'd done
growing up near the Texas cane fields.
Soon he couldn't even talk!

The plant, Dieffenbachia, they learned later,
was called "dumb cane" because its sap
is toxic and inflames the tongue and throat
causing temporary loss of speech.
Lee missed work that week
for the only time in his life.

… and Eileen and I left Marilyn’s place
holding dearly onto some long-silent, missing pieces
from the unspoken puzzle of my life.


© MLee Dickens’son 10 Sept 2019
(Daniel J Ricketts)


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Psyche
post Sep 12 19, 20:46
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Posts: 8,745
Joined: 27-August 04
From: Bariloche, Argentine Patagonia
Member No.: 78
Real Name: Sylvia Evelyn Maclagan
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:David Ting



Hi Daniel,
Sounds as if you discovered quite a lot about your childhood that nobody ever talked about. So many issues were taboo. I hope those beatings didn't really happen, maybe you've taken poetic license. But it all sounds real.

Took me a while to absorb the whole poem. Also surprised that you posted in FV. Don't you usually write sonnets or other forms?
Enjoyed, if that's the right word.
Psyche butterfly.gif


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JustDaniel
post Sep 13 19, 05:47
Post #3


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From: Southwest New Jersey, USA
Member No.: 6
Real Name: Daniel J Ricketts, Sr.
Writer of: Poetry
Referred By:Lori



Thank you so much, my dear friend. You're very perceptive, in that I did not take poetic license here. It all happened, and you're right. That visit to Tacoma blew the lid off of silence, both inside me and with some of my siblings. I really was shocked about many things that I learned, and I began understanding many things about myself.

And yes, I usually write in rhyme and meter. But I do a LOT of writing in haiku/senryu and short forms these days. I've been trying my hand at free verse (which is often metric), but this one is really prosetry. In fact, I've been encouraged to reformat it from poetic form to short story form. I'll probably do that here. Whatcha think?

deLighting in your sharing, especially in this often silent milieu, Daniel Guitar.gif


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