The day before my father's passing in 1997, I went looking for a Bible. I found the Bible all right, but I also
found something else. Poetry. Poetry by my father that I never knew about. I had realized that day that
I better be planning a funeral. After all, I was my parents' only child.
That day, September 14, Mom needed to run home from the hospital, where Dad had been for days. While she went about
feeding the dog and freshening up...I ran down to Dad's book shelves in the basement.
I had to find his field Bible, the one he use on Boy Scout camping trips. He had been our Scoutmaster and troop
Chaplain all in one. His favorite Bible for camping trips had been a black leather one with a zipper you could run around
the three sides. And, yes, I enjoyed doing that so often as a boy.
On the shelf near Mom's Reader's Digest Condensed Books and in between Dad's religious series by Cynthia Moss and writers
like Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, and Conrad, I saw my copy of Starting from San Francisco -- poems by Lawrence
Ferlingetti.
And Dad's field Bible!
With the Bible in hand and when reaching for my Ferlingetti, I noticed a funny looking book right next to Starting
from San Francisco. It look homemade. Definitely old and a dingy purple. Flipping the
book open, I noticed poems, lots of them -- typed and pasted in.
Flipping pages, I read "Kansas Prelude":
Alas! Come peer at the trampled sod
Come where bleeding men did part.
Come see where lazy cattle did nod,
O'er dim hillside unfold thy heart.
The battle days (we hope) are done -
Let no more bayonets prick our sod,
But let us live more as if one
And shine in the one splendor -- God.
Written in either 1939-1940
My father a poet?
Since Dad lay in a comatose state at St. Francis Hospital in Topeka, Kansas, I couldn't exactly ask, "Dad, where'd this
book come from? The Bleeding Kansas imagery?"
The next day -- September 15 -- my father died. He was 76.
As I continued to explore the poems that day and for days to follow, I liked the way my father mixed prairie imagery
with the contemporary 1930s-1940s American landscape. In other words, waning years of the Great Depression and
dawn of World War II. And so much youthful optimisim shining through. YET, an awareness was evident of his own
mortality.
As the weeks moved on, I came across an old black leather briefcase and found inside a paper sack filled with poems.
His originial drafts I realized and had even spoken to myself half aloud.
Each draft was signed, dated, and included the place where the poems were written. I counted just over 200 poems,
a short story or two, and a play. My Daddy had been a writer much to my surprise.
I knew he had been excited, when I came home talking about the English poets like Keats and Shelley back during my high
school days. I can't remember which poem, but he began reciting one. He had done the same thing with EdgarAllen
Poe, but in Poe's case I figured everybody liked Poe and could remember Poe's poetry. But even here, Dad never mentioned
writing his own poetry.
Going back to the Ferlingetti book, something else dawned on me. I wasn't sure what had ever happened to Starting
from San Francisco, until I found it with the poetry book and field Bible.
Mom and Dad started out as newlyweds in San Francisco (where he finished his Navy duties). From there, they moved
to New York City where Dad earned a master's degree at New York University and taught business courses at Packard Junior College.
He also hawked hot dogs on Fire Island beaches and did the company's books at night. He became a business professor
at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York in 1952, where I was born. Three and a half years later, we moved to Richmond,
Virginia, where Dad spent the next 30 years as a bookkeeper/accountant and office manager before retiring to Kansas in 1986.
They had said to be closer to their grandkids, since I had no plans to return to Virginia from my Paola, Kansas home.
They had been part of their generation -- the one's who left the little places for the bright city lights and didn't
look back. Or so they thought until retirement caught up with them. My mother in particular never lost her love
for New York City.
Nonetheless, he still gave up his poetry writing passion. Why? Of course, I'll never know. I figured and
still do, that he must've had enough on his plate: the starting a teaching career soon after college graduation interrupted
by a world war, marriage, grad school, I WAS BORN (that should've been enough to break any routines), and he was on his way...
But he still gave up something he enjoyed and that he was good at!
My father also described his final resting place in a poem called "Transformation," when he was a young 18. He
wrote:
The evening fades
Across the great hillside of night,
A cricket murmurs
Ere the twinkling night comes down.
In ecstacy linger by a fallen tree
And sense the mourning all around,
I ponder on the wind songs
Lament o'er trundled bits of prairie moss.
But lo - fire shot o'er the hills
The Brazen dawn drives memories astray,
And night and all its silhouettes
Fade before the dawn on a Kansas hillside.
September 19, 1939
I would like so much to say to my father, "Dad, you're buried on the hillside. Your Kansas hillside is in the Leavenworth
National Cemetery and your are facing west. And, Dad, when Mom left me on January 31, 2007, I knew a new headstone would
be necessary, since she was to buried with you under the same marker. Thanks to the feds approving personal inscriptions,
I wrote:
To Mom: You Never Lost Faith In Me Your Son Kevin.
To Dad: To The Prairie and To God.
