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Adapting the Craft
Adapting the Craft
My father looked up Zealot Street
toward the mountain where ore
buckets hung to cart the coal.
“Don’t go near the mine” he repeat-
ed, the chant of elders who fore-
warned him of the dangerous hole.
He’d just go up through Bessie’s place
to find a young tree with a v
that he could cut out with his knife
and string with rubber like a lace
to hold a pebble that might be
a deterrent in the daily strife
for a kid in Wiconisco
who didn’t wear patches on his pants
when the miners went on strike.
My father bought a super sling
from the Nu Martz Hardware’s stock
across from the farmer’s market.
It would be the very best thing
to load with a peppermint rock
and blast the squatting pidgin set
that left its guana in a pile
between the houses on our street.
No one ate peppermints anymore
since Hannah went away to hole
up at Marion’s down on Darby Road,
so my father used them to blister
the butts of pidgins unloading
in our alley way, day after day.
“Got another one,” he would roar.
Enid smiled. Should she keep score?
My father kept on going for
ninety years and a few months more.
He shot baskets with his grandson
and prowled the pathways in the park
across Whitehall in search of a young
straight tree with an inviting v, one
that might be honed to aid the aged.
But since the veterans that he served
had wandered far from earlier strife,
he cut a longer sapling with his knife.
He smoothed the wood, applied the stain.
My father’s slingshot had become a cane.
Copyright ©
Bill Keen
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