*Poetry — May 29, 2021
Martha
"Backyard", Marcus Jade,
8”x10",
Oil on Canvas,
2020
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In the night the vines
crawled to Martha, reached
up through points of history
to make home as a shroud
for a rain gutter joined
like a limb to what formed
the town, a form tied
to education, daughter
to the Baptist Church.
The first school is an organ
beating from a half-dugout.
It is a mild bout of love
wound in a roll of twelve
pupils, or twenty-four, so
new to time. The tone
of this is still here,
the ring of children
sitting on a wall.
Weeds draw their traces
in the edges, a frieze
to the yearly rumble of feet,
to the house as a newly formed
school, a net to grab us
at the line of letters
shoved hard to brick.
Let the file show our
permanent record, the space
of our years as a town. First,
the Baptist Church, then
another—that one thirsty song:
Pray For Rain. This school
is hers too, a medley
lined up in the lung.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 9. View full issue & more.
Sourced from an informational display by the Museum of the Western Prairie with regard to their "Indian-Pioneer Papers Collection", a part of the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma." Ryan Clark, on his method of homophonic translation: "In writing these poems, I used a unique method of homophonic translation which relies on the re-sounding of a source text, letter by letter, according to the various possible sounds each letter is able to produce (ex: “cat” may become “ash” by silencing the ‘c’ as in “indict,” and by sounding the ’t’ as an ‘sh-‘ sound, as in “ratio”)."