Poetry – Kelly Yandell

Showmen’s Rest and Bull Riders Reprieve

Short Story: I belong to a writers group and we took a road trip to Hugo, Oklahoma to visit the Mount Olivet Cemetery where there is a special section dedicated to honoring the lives of circus owners, performers and workers. Hugo was the winter home of several circuses and there is still an elephant sanctuary nearby. I wrote the following poem for fun before we went, knowing nothing of the place. It is a fictional imagining. The actual plot was extremely touching to me. The sense of family and community was lovely and the personalized markers leave one feeling that they knew a bit about the subterranean tenant. So when you get to the bit where I imagine them in a better place than Hugo, Oklahoma, I now stand corrected. When I told my daughter about the visit, she remarked, “Just think, they all lived their lives just to make people happy.” So true. The markers tell the tale so well.

Would You Fly?

Would you trade wisdom to fly?
Would you put down reason
To soar to the heights?
Would you leave the words and ground behind
If you could take wing a leap for the sky?

Would you drop your moral compass
To take to the ocean?
With whales and sharks and learn the music of motion
Of tides and currents, instead of weary devotion
To things and manifestations of human emotion?

Someone Has To

Someone has to love them.
Why must it always be me?
Why do I love the ones
With all the ticks and fleas?

I’ll take the ramblers and drunkards,
The tired, the sick, the lonely.
One like a malnourished street dog,
All surly and bony.

The broken, the beaten
The hated and cursed.
Downtrodden, dishonest,
The god awful worst.

Of This Place

I wasn’t made from the rib of a man
I was fashioned from a potent mixture
Of Gun Powder
And the Seeds of Bluebonnets
Bound together with the Sap of Mesquite Trees

I didn’t crack forth from the skull of a god
I was born in an Oyster Shell in Galveston Bay
And adorned with Pearls on my Birthday

I’m the Feral Daughter of the
First Twilight Star and the Bobcat.
The Child of a Blue Norther
That picked up the Red Dirt and carried
It to the rich
Soil south

The Crows

If we were crows they’d call us a murder
And you can be sure that’s what there’ll be.
As soon as we find that man Thomas Gentry.
And we meet up with him in West Tennessee.

Beth was our sister.
It was her, plus us three.
She was the prettiest and the youngest amongst us,
And Gentry took her off to West Tennessee.

Rock Bottom Cathedral

Rock Bottom Cathedral, where the suffering go.
Rock Bottom Cathedral, what brought you so low?
We don’t spend no time setting you right.
We welcome your lost soul in from the night.

Rock Bottom Cathedral, God’s own lost and found.
If you weren’t lost before, well you surely are now.
Nobody is looking, here’s where you’ll stay.
New misfits and losers are welcomed each day.

Crazy Man

Snakes and bones and musical thrones.
Wife’s long gone. The son won’t come home.
Here you stand, king of the hill.
Miserable and angry, a bitter pill.

You set it afire to watch it all burn,
Now all you can do is sit and yearn
For the things you had fore you run them away.
A love, a child, and friends that would stay.

The Old House Has Fallen

The old house has fallen.
I don’t know what part gave in
Or gave up
First.
Or if every last beam and joist
Just saw it coming
And gave up the ghost
All at once.

Footing

Creativity lives in the fragile.
A place where your skin is thin
And your armor is weakened
And you are as easily brought to rage as tears.
Music is ecstasy and becomes your heartbeat.

I remember dreams I had lifetimes ago.
I was standing at the edge of a cliff,
Clouds above, and below.
A towering leaf filled oak
Standing beside me on the precipice,
Roots bare and exposed but never falling.
We looked out over the clouds.
No bottom in sight.

Stand your ground,
Or fly.
But there is no fall.
There is no pull down,
No gravity.
No fear.
Just a wonderful view,

And a mind that has no footing at all.