For an election year

david youngJust got back from a week in Hawaii–a vacation spot that’s NOT overrated–that luscious warm ocean. It was a week without news for me, such a luxury. Now the papers blare again each morning.

Here’s a poem from another vacation, another election year. I love the turn it takes at the end.

Poem for Adlai Stevenson and Yellow Jackets

It’s summer, 1956, in Maine, a camp resort
on Belgrade Lakes, and I am cleaning fish,
part of my job, along with luggage, firewood,
Sunday ice cream, waking everyone
by jogging around the island every morning
swinging a rattle I hold in front of me
to break the nightly spider threads.
Adlai Stevenson is being nominated,
but won’t, again, beat Eisenhower,
sad fact I’m half aware of, steeped as I am
in Russian novels, bathing in the tea-
brown lake, startling a deer and chasing it by canoe
as it swims from the island to the mainland. Continue reading “For an election year”