Bertrand Woodrow Blandings Dade McGory,
experimental author, took the Galesburg Times
(for which he’d forked three dollars, paid in dimes)
and fed it through his blender. His agenda?
“My latest novel seems a little slender:
I needed random input for the story.”
I found this hand written poem in an old book on the back of an unfilled out Galesburg High School enrollment card. The name Harvey Kemp is written at the end of this short poem.
I found this poem touching and thought to share it. I haven't been able to locate the poem or poet on search engines after a half hour search. If anyone has info plz send.
Thanks
Blind
The spring blew trumpets of colors;
Her green sang in my brain.
I heard a blind man groping
"Tap-tap" with his cane.
I pitied him his blindness,
But can I boast "I see"?
Perhaps there walks a spirit
Close by, who pities me,
A spirit who hears me tapping
The fine-sensed cane of mind
Amid such unguessed glories
That I am more than blind
Harvey Kemp
above rendition is exactly as written.
Sandburg saw you
more than a century ago
in prairie-town Galesburg -
an old lady on the porch -
unbothered by the whooping cries
of ball-playing boys.
Strangely, you had become a missing piece
in the jigsaw puzzle of my life
and I found myself on a quest to find you.
A caption to a missing image alerted me -
followed by a tale
of deleted files and
hard drive crashes
until a reply
from a Knoxville college -
they had a picture of you!
A beggared five dollars later
your image arrived,
and I shared you with the world-
so that everyone may know
the face of the woman who taught us
the importance of little things.
____________________________________________________
Julia Carney (1823-1908) is the author of "Little drops of Water".
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