"The Life of a Star"
By Elizabeth Fredrickson
A young girl, barely twelve sits on a swing.
Wondering when her life will begin.
Will she be famous?
Or will she fall?
Her life pending on a single moment.
At twenty, her mind goes a mile a minute,
As she walks the path.
Will they like her or will they just laugh?
It has only been a year since she asked herself a question,
Will she succeed or fail?
Her future depending on what happens when she walks
through the door.
She closes her eyes when she stands in front of the judges.
The music flows from her,
The eyes disappear,
All she hears is the music in her head.
Five years later,
Lights shine on her face,
The question runs through her head,
Will she succeed or fail?
But this time she knows the answer,
She has succeeded,
But this time something is different,
Though she has found fame,
Something is still missing.
Then a thought, just like the one before, pops into her head,
Will she find love or will she be alone.
As she leaves the stage that night,
As she leaves the stage that night,
She ponders this question,
Looking at herself in the mirror wondering what will happen.
Two years later,
She looks into her little baby's eyes,
She has finally had her question answered.
With her husband by her side,
Their baby in her arms,
She knew that she had love and that she had fame.
With her music waiting,
And her family beside her,
She could never fail.
Finally the day has come,
Her time to move on,
Her life filled with many riches.
Between family, friends, and fame,
Her life had been completed.
She shut her eyes as her family shed tears,
Her soul rising to the skies to be among the stars.
I wrote this once when I was thinking of my secret dream of becoming a famous singer. The thought started when I first saw American Idol and has grown stronger since.
* * * * * * * * * *
"Iola Hughes at the grave of Linus O. Hughes"
(one of two companion poems)
By Todd Mountjoy
By Todd Mountjoy
You look like your father, only paler and dead.
And I want to reach out and breathe life into
your thin bones, but they’re dryer than the fields
your father plows with borrowed tractor and tools
You lasted longer than your brothers, made it
through the night to breathe in a breath of morning,
of haze and the heat of a new day. Warmth that you
could not absorb any more than your father’s fields
could drink of the morning dew and promises of rain
You are better off where you are, than to spend one
more day on the land that fights us harder than
the desire to lay down beside you and sleep, and rest,
and give myself to peace
"Deana Jordan with Daisy Carter when Iola Hughes had her
third son"
I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it.
It’s like that woman was made for given birth to death.
Growing and moving and getting’ big and round,
just to drop another dead seed into the ground
It’s like One-Eyed Frank can’t shoot straight
like it’s a curse or something, him having three sons
that rise and dies before they have a chance alone.
Like his fields and crops… and luck.
No girl, I ain’t seen nothin’ like it, and you
probably never will neither, long as you go about
midwifing to poor farming folks. Nope, nobody
got that luck like Frank and Iola, nobody that low.
I was introduced to narrative poetry by my friend and mentor Joe Berry. We read the works of David Lee (a poet who writes of pigs and rural life) and laughed until we cried, and also found times of reflection as David Lee reached in and touched us with his simple wisdom. Joe encouraged me to branch out and try to write in the voices of those who experience life on a different path than my own.
He suggested that I create a rural town and write down the stories of a dying community (much as small town Nebraska is slowing passing). I wrote a series of companion poems for a fictional California, MO (real town, not real people). The ones I included today are two that I favored more than the rest; exploring fate, hardship, and the death of a child.
Joe passed in 2002 while my daughter was in ICU for nine days (a touch and go time where we almost lost her twice). Joe called me from what would become his deathbed and encouraged me to “keep writing, Boy, keep writing.” Joe was a good man, concerned for my daughter and not mentioning that he wasn’t sure he’d make it through the night. He didn’t. I miss him and his Carolina accent mixed with laughter.
