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Sunday, May 13, 2007
I wish I had written this poem... or at least had legal permission to print this poem. But so is the way of the Internet. "Upon Being Asked Why I Dedicated My First Book To My Mother When There's Not A Single Poem In There About Her" By B.J. Ward, from Gravedigger's Birthday As Prometheus must have pocketed fire, slipping it from Olympus in the folds of his compassion and duplicity, so my mother stole a Webster's pocket dictionary. The Mansfield Jamesway Department Store was all discounts and lighting that refused to flatter, commerce sliding through its aisles as my mother slipped that book into her jacket, getting 30,000 words fatter. I know the arguments-- that's stealing; what about the owner?; what about teaching her son what's right? In truth, the entire Jamesway corporation would go out of business twenty-one years later, and I'm sure it had to do with the Webster's Riverside Pocket Dictionary whose pages held all the words of Ulysses and Paradise Lost and Look Homeward, Angel, but jumbled in alphabetical order. What can I say? She stole a dictionary for me because there were no words a judge could use that would be worse than her son starving for a lexicon he could grip like a wrench and loosen all those dumb bolts in his brain. receiving that dictionary taught me rectitude and the many dictates that come down from its cloistral mountaintop. I was suddenly rich, a son from the most indigent family in Hampton. How lucky--when I first started to rub against my language, sidle up to my own tongue, my mother stole me a book. Years later, I gave her one back. Labels: Tribute |
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