Poetry

#DigiWriMo : The Mist Lifts

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/05/2015 - 07:37

Let’s suppose that in some parallel, there is another #digiwrimo blogger equally dazed by dawn, walking on the other side of the valley. Equally somnambulist in reverie.

- Howard Scott in his blog post, On audience, on place #digiwrimo

As I read his blog post, I started composing a comment as a response, oxygen for his blog as he journeys. But I got to the quote above and thought, I am the parallel. I had been writing about the fog where I live, as a comment to a friend’s Facebook post about fog, and in my own short poem

As the mist lifts,
the remaining leaves
now brownish orange
cling to the trees.

Yes, I too, “too think of blogging as creative catharsis and personal archaeology”. Yet my writing is not academic writing. I write as a social media. Although, today, I’ll go speak at a junior high school career day about being a social media manager.

As to adding comments to the stuff I wrote prior to the 1990s, in 1983, after I had been on the Internet for a year, but not sharing my personal writings there, I’ve started putting some of that online. 1983. I haven’t been back to see if people left comments, and the project got put on hold when we packed up my journals and moved.

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To an Oversized Stuffed Bear

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/28/2015 - 17:28

There was nothing joyful
about
the oversized
stuffed bear
from the aisle
next to
the children’s pain relievers
at the local drug store.

It brought the mother
and child
brief happiness
before
being placed
in a memorial
to a child
who died
way too early.

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Poetry

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The Hangar

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/22/2015 - 20:38

Little did I know,
those forty years ago,
when I wrote my
lame comedy column
for the school newspaper,
The Mount Greylock
Echo
how it’s words would
echo
in my life today.

Little did I know,
those forty years ago
when I logged into
a distant computer
over a slow telephone line
from the small computer room
just off the guidance counsellor’s office
how computers would change
and change us
as I glance
at The Mount Greylock
Echo
webpage
with the latest news
from my old
high school.

Little did I know
as I practiced Morse code
in the basement of a friend’s house
or played with
army surplus
radio equipment
my father had
in our own basement
how much radio and communications
would change
and how much
it would stay the same.

Little did I know,
during those after school hours
huddling in the dark room
developing film
shot with old cameras
in the nasty chemicals
how one day
I would take a picture
with my telephone
and share it over
radio signals.

Little did I know
that forty years later
I would see an old
black and white photo
scanned into a computer
shared over the internet
to a thing called Facebook
and the memories
it would elicit.

It was junior high school
in the early seventies
when we were discovering
ourselves,
our bodies,
girls,
and archeology.
We were learning critical skills
as we dug in the sand
in the carefully constructed grid
laid out by our teachers.

Now,
some of our classmates
have died
way to early
friends have become distant
as other classmates
that we didn’t know
or couldn’t stand
have become friends,
and one of them posted
not only
the scanned in
black and white pictures
which brought forth
so many memories
but also the article
in the Mount Greylock ECHO
about the hangar
being demolished.

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Poetry

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The Samuel Baldwin Memorial Ingress Portal

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/08/2015 - 19:58

The cars zoomed by
the large rock
with the rusting bronze
plague
and the small American Flag
planted by the D.A.R.

No one,
except for the town historian,
an avid genealogist,
who served on the school board,
knew anything
about this
revolutionary war
hero,
the first cousin
of her fourth great grandfather
on her mother’s side.

But now,
late at night
young men with cellphones
stop beside the monument
playing
a twenty first century
game of war.

Note: This was written for a writers prompt to describe a landmark. I took a different angle on this and described the landmark, first in terms of the actual, someone obscure landmark, and then brought in aspects of the game Ingress, played on cellphones, in which landmarks are ‘portals’ in the game.

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