An Overland is a stagecoach, it symbolizes the saga, the legacy of millions of people in America who traversed first from the East to the West in search of Manifest Destiny. Later came the Overland trains the transpacific route, and later the the Overland car 1901, all transportation systems in the history of Americana which issued the innovations which arrived from the Old War to the New World and to the West Young Man. note by Carlos Mijares Poyer.
photo courtesy of wikipedia.
copyright(c) 1985, by Carlos Mijares Poyer.
Overland: A Midwestern Postcard
That sells for 2 cents
It’s sitting over there
A piece of good country on my desk.
It sports a scene to breathe
Yellow-freckled gals
And hard-eyed mining men,
Living in farms, condecorated with barns,
All harbored by a wattle fence.
All below,
Under a sky loitering and hung
That to the glance ripples away,
Then settles to a blue steppe
Dappled by nimbused clouds
Like goblins in cumulus crowds,
Smiling for a Rockwellian sun.
And a dusty road
Long and leaving;
An old Chevy on it,
Honking and rattling over a brawny hill,
Lying with legs spread
Sunbathing its rusted grass.
This is the postcard of fabled town
With its farmers swimming in fields
Plowing at scarified dreams.
Here, in the home of world’s tallest wheat,
It’s surprising to see all this;
In a 2 cent postcard
That I know,
Is more than light captured on a piece of sheet,
I can hear one Overlander
Struggling amongt the tall sunburned wheat,
Hidden near the parting Chevy, to its right,
Playing with thought puzzles and
Picking the last thorns
From his bare knuckled feet.
Over the hill
And lost in their own stillness,
Stoic folks, moxie just breathing,
In their large shingled homes;
Are seated with the whispered air on the veranda,
Dandling their feathered hair
Like air dandles a scarf,
Like air to their noses mellered;
By the smell of wisterias
Coiled and smiling
From white, soiled portico columns.
So to the good country a town
So to Overland
A down-town named Ur-ban;
Blue and puddled,
Painfully buzzing with the sound
Of dying neon signs
And the young cackle
Of blanche gals in summer dresses,
Waiting like hens in long cinema lines.
And every night the grand Chevys close in
Exhibiting their fins
Converging at a diner
In a restless cloud of soporous dust,
Honking like red-nosed clowns
In supercilious lust.
In a monotone chain of time, link by noisy link,
The days that move in Overland,
Like an old turtle’s trot
In heavy steps that drop
A low hum from the heart.
Back just one more time, here
And pure, in the Overland church-like homes
And local little boys and girls,
Wearing knee-patched trousers
And wool knitted socks.
School is out,
And their young mothers, already sagging,
No longer have to wait
Outside the back school doors.
Where they would stand
Playing with their weight,
Sometimes right or maybe left, saying:
“Where is that kid of mine?”,
Then puzzled and bored
Hating all motherly chores, wishing
“Please!!!”
For the school to purchase a bus.
Good-bye,
Perhaps this postcard
Will be a stamp to collect.
A classic trace of the real midwest.
Perhaps next century,
Looking at it and not finding that same piece
Of good country.
Only an American Tundra
Dressed with scattered cold stricken barks,
And ravens hovering, circling
Imitating the methods
Of hungry sharks.
Here where,
Beetles used to cling to the reeds of wheat
And sway viciously with the kick of all winds.
But that was long ago,
When there was a will
In the soul of living things.
Now a fly stands over this postcard
And then it dashes away
“Sometimes the flight of the fly is welcome,
Because it reflects our laziness.
The laziness of mind
That we don’t possess.”
But all in all,
I show this postcard,
That sells for two cents,
The going price to pay
For a glance at emptiness.
Over a basket of fruit
Kneel the Overland youth,
Over them lingers their saddening souls,
Over them, dies their mirth.
Like an old turtle’s trot
In heavy steps that drop
A low hum from the heart
The drowning ant in silence
And Overland in greater silence dies.
Like an old turtle’s trot
In heavy steps that drop
A low hum from the heart
The numb dust of things
The distant hum of things.
A low hum from the heart.
OVERLAND: A MIDWESTERN POSTCARD, POEM, Author’s note:
Poem I began writing in Kansas City, Overland Park and later finished in Caracas, Venezuela 1985. First published in the “Piper” Literature and Arts Magazine of Guilford Liberal Arts College in Greensboro, North Carolina, USA, in the winter issue of the magazine in the winter of 1987. Translated later by the author and the translator of the Ultimas Noticias Newspaper in Venezuela it’s Cultural Supplement: published in the Ultimas Noticias Newspaper in Spanish in December of 1989. Published in The Galway Review of the National University of Ireland on February 21, 2016.
If for some reason someone has the shallowness of thinking this an anti-american poem you go argue that issue with Prof. Henry Taylor Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987 for his book “The Flying Change” of American University and Hollins College, who invited me to the MFA in Creative Writing at American University, I did not go because I did not graduate from Guilford College for already known reasons, and argue with the editorial board of the Ultimas Noticias Cultural Supplement publication awarded in Paris and the world for including the best writers from different countries.
