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| Ruth Ann Thrun |
The three poems in today’s post all say family members nourished their love of poetry. First, a poet from Wisconsin, where hunting is part of the culture, pays tribute to his sister.
Anymore, it’s not about shooting a deer
She was Ruthie
to me. My big sister, my hero.
She was Miss
Thrun to her high school students,
making
“History” relevant, changing young lives.
She showed them how
to look at things, how to
analyze and prioritize
…her own eyes always quick
not only to instill The
Fear of God in them, but also
how to show kindness
and love. To empathize.
She was already
gone… Complications, they said,
of uterine cancer
diagnosed too late. “A blessing,” the
doctor added.
A pulmonary clot during a transfusion.
Sixteen years later,
I posthumously accepted, on
Ruthie’s behalf, an Honored
Faculty Award under the
halftime lights at a
high school homecoming game.
This at UNC’s Lab
High School in Greeley, CO.
Her former students
then were adults, and her fellow
educators were all
retired. Yet, each spoke as if they’d
just discussed
national politics with her …only yesterday.
My eyes welled again
from emotions I’d so long buried.
We brought her back
to Wisconsin -- my mother, my
twin sister and
I. Ruthie rests now at Hope Cemetery,
hardly a mile from
where I still hunt whitetails. And, I tell
her again, each
fall, how sorry I am that I never told her
how much I really
loved her, nor how thankful I was for the
paperback of Robert
Frost’s Poems, she gave me that
Christmas when I was
14 …that’s made all the difference.
~ Thomas A. Thrun
Binod Dawadi, a Nepali poet, credits his love for poetry to his father. He says to his father, "I can't give you anything," while he is giving his father praise. He is also honoring his father by continuing the tradition of reading and writing.
My Father – My Inspiration to Be a Poet
My father couldn't
read above tenth grade level.
He was bullied and
hated by friends
So he couldn't get a
higher position job.
He worked as a
government officer in small post.
In his free time, he
read Mahabharata and Ramayana,
Sometimes Gita. He
used to spend all his time
reading. He also wrote
short stories,
Autobiography and
poems.
He told me, You
should read more and write more
To you share your
knowledge
To the world, and you
will obtain more knowledge.
I used to listen him
reading and watch him writing.
From my childhood, I
knew that reading and writing
can make us great,
so I read literature and wrote poems.
These, along with my
father's motivation and inspiration
Made me fall in love
with poetry,
My father left me
and my family
when I was just 11
years old,
But I remember his
words and I see him
in a dream for
forever,
I can't give you
anything, my father,
Sita Ram Dawadi, but
today I praise you
and make you
immortal through my poetry.
Today you are is
inside my soul guiding me
To think and imagine
and to be a writer.
~ Binod Dawadi
Dawadi added these words of tribute: “My father was my hero. He taught me good cultures. He always read and wrote in his free time. He also motivated me to read and write. So from his good habits I learned to read and write at home as well as school. So I became a writer. My father physically left us more than 20 years ago, but his spirit is connected to mine and makes me a creative writer with imagination. Thank you so much my father. You will be immortal.”
Finally, a poet from Massachusetts pays tribute to her creative aunt:
Marvelous Peggy
Born forty years
premature,
our aunt stacked her poetic meanderings
on cob-webbed shelves in her mind,
dusting off her
masterpieces
at intimate family gatherings, “holy roller” meetings,
(her words, not mine), cherished private readings
of her remarkable rhyming
revelations,
contentious political skewerings,
and late-in-life religious epiphanies.
Out of her imagination
flowed discerning, humorous, pointed
interpretations of the world and those within it.
Poetry − her lifeline for
unloading heavy burdens,
livening up a party, boisterously airing her views
Oh Democracy, where art thou? she’d cry.
Intimidated by technology
of any variety,
she never actualized sharing opportunities
cyberspace affords fellow writers and poets.
On her death I uncovered
her treasure;
poems scribbled on scraps of paper,
in old notebooks, the back of greeting cards.
a legacy to be shared with
family members,
brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews,
scattered across the country;
drawing together related
strangers
through common literary history and interest,
forever reuniting this Girl Scout with that hitchhiker,
who was the very picture
of her glamorous aunt,
from her literary prowess, to her luxurious fingernails;
sister-cousins, rejoined by the closing of a door.
~ Elaine Sorrentino
Here is "Marvelous Peggy" herself:
These poets retain copyright on their own poems
Coming up next: poems that hooked their readers, followed by tributes to poetry mentors, and poets who hooked their readers. Submissions sometimes overlap these categories, of course. Thrum’s poem above would fit into the category of poets who hooked their readers as well as the category of family members nurturing the love of poetry.
Bios:
Binod Dawadi, Kathmandu, Nepal, the author of The Power of Words, has a master's degree in English. He has worked on more than 1000 anthologies published in various renowned magazines. His vision is to change society through knowledge, so he wants to provide enlightenment to the people through his writing skills.
Elaine Sorrentino has been published in Minerva Rising, Willawaw Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Ekphrastic Review, Writing in a Women’s Voice, Global Poemic, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Agape Review, Haiku Universe, Sparks of Calliope, Muddy River Poetry Review, Your Daily Poem, Panoplyzine, Etched Onyx Magazine, and at wildamorris.blogspot.com. She was featured on a poetry podcast at Onyx Publications.
Thomas A. Thrun, retired in Oconomowoc, WI, cites his life-long interest in writing especially to his Wisconsin farming heritage and to Robert Frost’s poetry. Thrun’s father was an oral teller of farming stories – on the church steps after Sunday services and places like the local feed mill and grocery store -- to anyone who’d listen, with each story, like one of Frost’s poems, usually ending in a simple truth. Hence, inspiring Thrun’s own narrative, poetic style. A former weekly newspaper editor in Wisconsin and Washington State, Thrun earned his undergraduate degree in English/Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville and has been published in a number of state and national anthologies. He now dotes on his own, two young grand boys.
