by Earl J. Wilcox
My mom always said I churned up a storm
when as a youngster I raced through our house
on my stick pony, long before I stormed life.
A child, I begged to learn to play piano, to sing
at the Holiness Church (we were devout Baptists),
prattling on and on like a whirlwind in my faux
holy-roller-speaking-in-tongues voice on Saturday
night. Like them, I jigged and danced across
the creaking floor of our small bungalow,
feeling I was in the eye of a hurricane—
or God’s eye—swirling around me, but never
once prayed my name might be spoken with
trepidation and some awe many decades later
when storm season revs up, and EARL flashes
across weather maps---digitized and analyzed
by forecasters speaking in unknown weather tongues.
Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to The New Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.
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