Friday, August 5, 2022: Marjorie R Becker's poems "In Bryon Where the Fruit Came From", and "Word of Dawn's Provisions Came Around"

 

                                                         © 2022 marie c lecrivain

    

In Byron Where the Fruit Came From

He said they treat you like a store

front brimming ripe with Christmas and

 

I, so Jewish in my ways and play

could only laugh the ground, the sound

 

that I depended on because I lived

and farmed a tiny bit of Byron, Georgia earth

 

my people left me. I owned a hut,

I won the keys to Sammy’s car

 

because, he said, I want to give you

wheels to blast away each time

 

they say such keen mistaken things. And

I, I wondered why he wanted then, again

 

to share my harmonies, my backyard

range of food I gave away to people

 

who arrived in times of hungry need

for all the fruits and greens we picked

 

and made into a sort of somehow

ripening.

© 2022 Marjorie R. Becker

 

Word of Dawn’s Provisions Came Around

 

The fruit itself, the wayward plums believed

their gifts adrift through dawn’s experience until

my great aunt played her violin and summoned

unsung notes askew, the naked notes themselves

 

believed they still conceived, ensure the violin

of dawn among the plums, the cantaloupe, the wild

experience of color, calm adrift, proclaimed the fruit

itself, those onetime plums believed, ensured their

 

colors shared the open dawn, the porch itself

asunder when we women of the Downtown Purple

Pawn arrived with hammers’ ripe experience.

The light delivered, its dawn belonged to us as we

 

began the song of plums asunder, plundered, too, tu

we, we women held the hammers fast, reprieved, restored

the wilderness of naked notes, of true belief

in wild astray, the sudden pie, the kinds of open food,

 

of treat that dawn’s experience, that naked need for

touch, for taste asunder that the plums themselves had

hoped that dearly dawn, that evening too, to ponder.

© 2022 Marjorie R. Becker

“I hold a Yale doctorate in Latin American gendered and cultural history and am the author of the prize-winning historical monograph Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (UC Press, 1996), the forthcoming Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz (University of New Mexico Press, 2022,) and the three poetry collections, Body Bach (2000,) Glass Piano/Piano Glass (2005,) and The Macon Sex School: Songs of Tenderness and Resistance (2020,) all from Tebot Bach. I have received an array of awards and am a professor of Latin American history and English at USC.”