September 2017
I have two poems this month. The first poem is about my grandmother's Schoenhut Doll. These were wooden dolls with movable metal joints, made in Philadelphia. The doll was disturbing in it's wooden realism. The second is about a tree house built long ago by my unmarried great uncle who was a coal miner in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. It was a magnificent tree house, built impossibly high off the ground. I wonder, now, if my great uncle would go up there to sleep in the trees when we kids weren't around.
Hinged
Doll of wood and movable
metal joints
a girl’s birthday present in 1919
my grandmother
her father in prison
she dropped off
on the Pennsylvania-German
farm of her grandparents
up against the mountains
of Schuylkill County
before it was lost
to depression
each rusty joint of the doll
still moves
although grudgingly
she can be made
to be eerily expressive
in her stance
in her mood
but she’s wooden
all the way through
Unleaving
He crawled from the coal mine
with hammer and new nails
the tree house he built
floated impossibly upward
yet held steady
in an embrace I remember
of twin ash trees with their fingering
tendril roots weaving downward
deep into the carbon root
of the mountain
my imagination airborne
amid the flutter and drift
of autumn’s golden leaves
Hinged
Doll of wood and movable
metal joints
a girl’s birthday present in 1919
my grandmother
her father in prison
she dropped off
on the Pennsylvania-German
farm of her grandparents
up against the mountains
of Schuylkill County
before it was lost
to depression
each rusty joint of the doll
still moves
although grudgingly
she can be made
to be eerily expressive
in her stance
in her mood
but she’s wooden
all the way through
Unleaving
He crawled from the coal mine
with hammer and new nails
the tree house he built
floated impossibly upward
yet held steady
in an embrace I remember
of twin ash trees with their fingering
tendril roots weaving downward
deep into the carbon root
of the mountain
my imagination airborne
amid the flutter and drift
of autumn’s golden leaves
© 2017 Sylvia Cavanaugh
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