Friday, April 24, 2009

It's odd how the prompt on the poetry challenges keep fitting my experiences and mood. Today the prompt was to write a travel poem - and today I rode the Greyhound bus down to Corpus to visit Bob. Writing this travel poem was fun.

Secret Time Machine

Greyhound bus sailed across
across green Texas green flats,
where cattle took shade, munched
bluebonnets under knots of live oak,
through tiny towns with giant
courthouses, tempting bakery
signs, main street banners
proclaiming rodeo, water melon
thump, football championship.
Homecoming..Secret time machine.

Greyhound bus let me out
today in beach city where
husband's welcoming arms
pulled me in.. He couldn't see
I'd detoured back forty six years
to my first bus trip alone, finally
old enough at twelve, sucking
Crystomint, playing solitaire, past
grazing cattle, under bright banners.
Homecoming. Secret time machine.

Victoria Hendricks, April 25, 2009



I'm glad to be here with Bob as he nervously prepares to tutor kids in math tomorrow morning - nervous because this group is just beginning to get important concepts, and very close to the dreaded TAKS. While he tutors, I'll clean. Then we'll join a teacher friend and her husband for lunch and hope for dusk on the beach. It is good to be here. And I was glad we were together when we learned that Heidi's tumor markers were increasingly abnormal this month. I haven't absorbed that news entirely yet, just sitting up feeling love and support for them while Bob sleeps to get ready for the tutoring.

2 comments:

Mary said...

I enjoyed your Secret Time Machine poem, as it triggers 'secret time machine' memories of my own -- not with bus journeys though, but with plane journeys.

I hope you have an enjoyable dusk at the beach tonight!

Peggy said...

I too enjoyed your secret time machine, Victoria. I have not traveled much by bus in my life but I do recall the first time I traveled alone by plane--I was recently married and joining DH in Europe where he was in the Army. Seems so long ago now. Seems strange to realize for all the many travels I had as a kid none of them were by myself. in fact traveling by myself is something I have only really done in the past 10 years or so.