T. S. ELIOT’S FIRST WASTE LAND

by Susan Terris

Cabanne Spring, Forest Park: vintage undated image with unidentified children from the archives of Louis (1907-1999) & Georgia (1918-2009) Buckowitz via Urban Review: St. Louis.

—The Waste Land poem is 100 years old this month.

Twit twit twit... turn of the century, it's 1900, and Tom

born in St. Louis, not yet known as T. S., found his first
waste land: Forest Park, 1,371 acres of countryside.

In the middle of the city, wild but with street cars:
an amusement park and a steam-driven carousel
(yes, that 1944 Meet Me in St. Louie whirlabout).
 
Both Tom and my Nanna Edna, almost the same age,
lived nearby on one side of the park. Did they meet? 
Jug jug jug... Maybe not, and yet I begin to see
 
them one day on the carousel when he and Edna
were both eleven: Tom, in a tan jacket and hat, 
riding the lead horse with roses around its neck,
 
smiling down at her—a girl in white organza, in
the white swan chariot. Perhaps. But what came next?
Oh   jug jug jug  Tom left St. Louis, went to Harvard.
 
Edna stayed, went to Fontbonne, a teachers college,
studied math, grammar, poetry, was the first woman
(or man) in our big family with a college degree.
 
Shantih   shantih   shantih   A hundred years passed:
Nanna Edna gone. T. S. Eliot gone and yet still there. 
The Waste Land, a mystery, kismet, a search for selves

Susan Terris is a freelance editor and the author of 7 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, and 2 plays. Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Denver Quarterly, The New Verse News, and Ploughshares. Poems of hers have appeared in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Her newest book is Dream Fragments, which won the Swan Scythe Press Award. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor at Pedestal.