earl j. wilcox : “southern sunday”

 

...for elizabeth...

 

It was the spring after you had been to China,

where you first ate eel, snake, dog, and hundred-

year old eggs. Snapped on a Sunday after a lunch

of quiche or the other family favorite, chicken,

the picture blossoms with a background of azaleas

festooned against a latticed wooden fence our

neighbors built to ward off the likes of us who play

Beatles, Bono, or Bach at all hours, laugh

with the heartiest, look happy in photographs.

 

In the picture, our sons and I wear tee shirts you

bought in Hong Kong or was it Beijing where

you dashed with friends to a KFC for wings and

soggy veggies you would never touch at home

because you had lost weight from not eating food

served in a dingy Outer Mongolian hut or on the

trains from the large cities to the tiny hovels with

TV sets, where gaunt Chinese exist in places guide-

books fail to mention. Southern men, we look overfed.

 

The two boys squat behind me, like a pair of baseball

catchers waiting for the pitch---perhaps a screwball

or a knuckler nobody can catch much less hit. We

all look much younger than I can see in my mind’s

eye now: robust, smiling, happy faces caught in a

spring snapshot brimming with sass which you had

sense enough to notice. Bright red, Chinese logos on

our tee shirts date the picture which remains timeless.

 

Earl J Wilcox writes about baseball, aging, birds, hair stylists, dreaming, and life in the South. His poems appear in The Centrifugal Eye, Strange Horizons, Underground Voices, New Verse News, Rejuvenate, Arkansas Literary Forum, Southern Gothic, Word Riot, and elsewhere. At the seasoned age of 74, he began writing poetry three years ago.

 

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