Tag Archives: cemetery

Odd poem: Jimmy Carter, on dead people voting in Georgia

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‘Progress Does Not Always Come Easy’

As a legislator in my state
I drew up my first vote to say
that citizens could never vote again
after they had passed away.

My fellow members faced the troubling issue
bravely, locked in hard debate
on whether, after someone’s death had come,
three years should be adequate

to let the family, recollecting him,
determine how a loved one may
have cast a vote if he had only lived
to see the later voting day.

My own neighbors warned me had gone
too far in changing what we’d always done.
I lost the net campaign, and failed to carry
a single precinct with a cemetery.

Jimmy Carter’s collection of poems ‘Always a Reckoning’ is unexpectedly good for a politician, and it was a best seller when published in 1995. And this particular poem is not only amusing, but it resonates strangely with 2020 presidential election, and claims of fraud in the Georgia results. It would appear from the poem that Georgia politics is more honest than it was in the 1960s, anyway.

Jimmy Carter followed a bizarre and contradictory path in politics, always having been firmly committed to racial integration and equality, but having to constantly support people like Alabama segregationalist George Wallace in order to get elected. Then, once elected, trying to move the state’s politics in a direction that many of his backers did not like. Whether things played out the way they are presented in the poem is not something I can determine from a superficial review of his career. But it’s a fun poem, anyway.

Photo: “39 Jimmy Carter” by US Department of State is marked with CC PDM 1.0

Potcake Poet’s Choice: LindaAnn LoSchiavo, “A Visit to Cemetery Hill”

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LindaAnn LoSchiavo

When was it? How did I become the kind
Who failed to cherish life, discarded laughs?

I’d done no Christmas shopping since Dan died.

Strange forces urged me out as more snow fell,
Filling the windows, decorating trees,
Avoiding certain branches — — just like folks
Who know how to keep apart. The weatherman
Advised pedestrians to stay indoors.

Barely protected, wearing an old coat,
Worn out boots, steered by impulses alone,
I trudged along until I realized
The yuletide hypnotized my weary eyes.

Against my will, those luminarias
Attracted. Coffined lights, like sentinels,
Marked gates of Cemetery Hill, where we
Had bid adieu. Temptation made me stoop
To steal a souvenir — — when he appeared.

I tried to run. My heavy rubbers clung,
Wet mud imprisoning me like quicksand.
My footprints left a useless trail behind,
Uncertain as redemption once denied.

The faceless creature merged with me. Mid-gait,
My right leg was suspended, awkwardly,
When I heard singing — — yes! — — “Die Fledermaus,”
Our favorite, the last performance Dan
And I enjoyed together — —happy times
Resurrected at Prince Orlofsky’s ball,
As Strauss’s music peeled away sorrow,
A ghostly partner lifting me, leading
Us effortlessly in a waltz. I felt
Like Rosalinde, my shearling a silk gown,
Fond debutante who danced, dipped, all aglow.

As quick as this possession overtook
Me, it departed. My boots made contact
With earth. I watched as the transparent male
Took two steps, disappeared. The sun came up.

I headed home, discovering the snow
Completely cleared away, and whistling
That overture. Attempting to make sense
Of this experience, all I knew was
Words do not live entirely inside
Language and neither does such new found joy.

LindaAnn Schiavo writes: “This ghost poem (pasted in below) is based on an actual New York City yuletide encounter with a spirit.

Back-story:
Right before Xmas, in the mid-1990s, I had just left The Strand Bookshop in NYC.
The sidewalk is unusually wide on Broadway by Grace Church.
But when I saw the ghost, I deliberately altered my path to collide with it.
Poor soul, roaming around, was probably visiting a neighborhood he once knew.
He was wearing a dark hooded tracksuit.
His nylon work-out pants had light stripes down the side of each leg.
He had a slim, athletic build — — a man cut down in his prime.

I just had to “make contact.”
Why? To offer my warmth, my joy, my essence as temporary comfort to this restless spirit.

Process notes:
Twenty years later, I fictionalized it.
My protagonist became a lonely, joyless widow who meets a ghost [i.e., her dead husband].
I imagined an emotional yet mysterious “reunion” on Xmas Eve that would somehow offer comfort to a woman, enabling her to regain her joy even though she can’t quite explain what happened.

After my 1,500-word short story was published and also translated into Russian, I revised it as a poem.”

 

LindaAnn LoSchiavo, recently Poetry SuperHighway’s Poet of the Week, is a member of SFPA and The Dramatists Guild. Her poetry collections “Conflicted Excitement” [Red Wolf Editions, 2018], “Concupiscent Consumption” [Red Ferret Press, 2020], and Elgin Award nominee “A Route Obscure and Lonely”‘ [Wapshott Press, 2020] along with her collaborative book on prejudice [Macmillan in the USA, Aracne Editions in Italy] are her latest titles.

“A Route Obscure and Lonely” speculative poetry by LindaAnn LoSchiavo is available on Amazon.