Summertime
Welcoming summer’s arrival, featuring poems by Mary Jo Balestreri, Margaret Hoehn, Kirby Olson and Sarah Yerkes.
TRANSCRIPT
It’s almost that moment when we stop saying, “You think it’s hot now? Wait ‘til summer!” and start saying, “Well, only three months ‘til fall and cooler weather.” Summer this year officially begins late in the evening of June 20. To commemorate the season, some poems about summer.
We’ll start in the city, with Mary Jo Balestreri’s poem “black manhattan.” She said it was inspired by a collage of Romare Bearden.
It was hot that summer of ’69.
I stared out the window of my heat-trapped
tenement, watched and waited for something,
anything. Neighbors sat isolated in stupor,
too drained to talk. The rhythm of the street
shuffled and brooded. Even the sky sagged.
I couldn’t stop thinking of orange that summer,
our orange-colored buildings with no insulation,
no covering for our windows, the fire-orange sun
that fried us like eggplant, the orange “do not enter”
signs that restricted our movement. Orange choked
me like a hand around my neck. When I saw
a mother with her boy, I wondered what comfort
she could possibly give this summer of free-flowing
anger, of tear gas and riots. What good were civil rights?
When I finally noticed the iron scaffolding on the building
across the way, open and airy, its whole body laughing, it
startled me. Clothes swung upside down on a high wire,
waving like a little tune, waving me along, along, saying
Let’s go, girl! A hum rose in my throat as orange stretched
to a hint of blue.
“black manhattan,” Mary Jo Balistreri, from Passager’s 2008 issue that marked the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination.
Here’s another poem about heat, maybe a very different kind of heat. “Fire Season” by Margaret Hoehn from Passager’s 2015 Poetry Contest Issue.
A book of matches lies
forgotten on a closet shelf.
So much heat can be concealed
in the darkness for years.
And a match, like any secret
left to nimble in an unlit space,
can kick up a sweltering wind,
cause the asphalt to soften,
cars to overheat and break down,
men to get lost in those wavering
ribbons of heat. Once the first spark
is struck, all it takes for the next
is a sideways look, a fever, or the rasp
of a word against skin. Tonight, all
it takes is a man and a woman
who sit in the sweat of the kitchen
and will not meet each other’s eyes
and will not speak. The woman
is fingering a rose that she has picked
from the garden: that match head
of orange which can light up
a room or burn a house down.
Margaret Hoehn’s poem “Fire Season.”
For a lot of people, summer means spending time at the lake. Or the ocean. Kirby Olson said, “A couple years ago, my wife suggested we go to Ocean City, NJ, and I fought it, preferring the museums of New York City. Eventually we packed up and off we went. It felt strange to be on a beach with terns running up and down in the surf with a half million people dipping in and out of the water or floating on tubes. Eventually, the experience became the poem “Jersey (July).”
(By the sea, vacancy.)
In the wading pool, a litter
of starfish.
In the surf, a dollar
floating, a green paper
fish.
(By the sea, vacancy.)
A prop airplane, lone above Cape May,
lone above the lighthouse, carrying
a ripple-word banner . . .
Baby, it is easy to push
the beach ball
back and forth,
forth . . .
Baby, it’s easy to be
at the sea.
(In that vacancy
by the sea.)
From Passager’s 2011 Poetry Contest issue, Kirby Olson’s “Jersey (July).”
We’ll end with a poem by centenarian Sarah Yerkes about returning to the place where she’s spent so many summers. “Howland House—2017.”
Here I am, by myself again,
in our boarding house by the sea,
without my faithful Thomas dog
who used to keep me company.
When I was here alone before,
resting from a hectic summer
with children running in and out –
years ago, when I was younger,
evening drinks with cheerful friends
(they’re all dead now or moved away),
morning gossips on the beach,
one eye out so the kids don’t stray –
so many little, tow-haired ones,
we never could tell each from each,
I played golf in the afternoons
on nine holes, all with gorgeous views.
My golf scores never did improve
but some things that I’ll never lose
are memories of happy times
playing with the ones I loved.
This year I thought that it would be
an interesting experiment
to stay here by myself again –
Would I be lonely or content?
A friendly neighbor has agreed
to watch and feed me now and then.
I’ve been back long enough to know
the venture was a wild success.
Since deafness now isolates me
I miss people less and less.
No guessing about what I’ve missed.
I thrive on salt air by the sea.
From her book The Days of Blue and Flame, “Howland House—2017” by Sarah Yerkes. To buy Sarah’s book The Days of Blue and Flame, subscribe to, donate to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, visit passagerbooks.com.
Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.
For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Not pictured: Mary Jo Balestreri
