A Stop to See Hepatica

Caught in the midst of our own tragic and personal hell, and just a month before the onset of our country's Covid 19 debacle, I made a decision to sit down each morning and write a poem about a memory, that is if I could remember one. And what began as an exercise to somehow save my childhood for posterity morphed into something quite different from what I first imagined it would be. Sure, a few childhood memories did crop up, but my wife's daily pain and suffering a mere fifty feet or so away from where I sat writing emphasized how connected to the present we really were. While I was hunkered down in my Florida Panhandle storage shack, she was literally almost dying nearby, trapped in our travel trailer we had called home for two years. Old and unexplained injuries, and the somehow related and accompanying neurological condition that followed, were constantly wreaking havoc in her poor brain and body, making her in ways temporarily insane. Plus our daughter was suffering in her own hell from the ravages of cancer twenty-five hundred miles away. The emotional turmoil involved in this relentless and vicious whole-body wreckage was often unbearable for all of us. And that is why my childhood memories often segued into subjects that exerted more pressing demands. The one-hundred and eight poems to follow could likely be grouped into a few segments or chapters allowing for the range of experiences from 2019 through 2022. This book of poems is now a chronologically saved recording of certain stories, or worlds, regarding some of the people who have been so alive and present in it.