Poems

FREDERICK TURNER

Literary StudiesUniversity of Texas-DallasRichardson, TX 75083-0688

In Honor of Edie Turner, May 28,2000

Now she is honored, the grave academics invite her,Cheeses and melon balls glow by the bottles of chardonnay,Presidents seat her in her black dress and jewelry,Learned citations in footnotes remember her name.

What was she once, though?—a girl who lived in a caravan,Field hand, agricultural laborer, her young husband andLover an army private in khaki serge uniform,Digging up German bombs in the season of war.

What future had she, this waif with her youth and her courage?Buried in country England, disowned by her parents,Penniless, pregnant, on fire with Red ideology,Sure to be shot with her man if the Germans arrived?

What could she drink but the raw milk of the dairy,What could she eat but the apples that fell from the apple tree,Chocolate and bread that the boy brought back from the barracks,Cabbages grown in the patch by the broken brick wall?

Every day he could have been killed by the madness, theInched thread of the white-metal detonator,How they loved each other, like Connie and the black-haired gamekeeper:Sometimes his blouse came back spattered with blood of his friends.

Can we recapture that time before the beginning, whenAll was promise, the unconscious health of the young?It was a different age of the world was that one,Everything could have been different, he could have been killed—

She could have suffered bad luck with the childbirth, the fever,I could have murdered her body in my strife to be born;They might have faltered, lost trust in the life that they worshiped;All the achievement was still in the dark womb of time.

Celebrate all of the work, but always rememberNone of that edifice yet stood in those years;All the world was opposed to their love and ambitions,She was an ignorant girl in the arms of her lover,He was a boy poet in a world full of fears.

Anthropology and Humanism 26(2):195-205. Copyright ©2002, American Anthropological Asscx iation.