Franklin and Philadelphia
Poems from Philadelphia-area writers Joy Gorson, Beth Brown Preston, and Bill Van Buskirk.
TRANSCRIPT
Benjamin Franklin was born Jan. 17, 1706 and died about 85 years later. Although he was never president, he was a heck of a lot of things: ambassador to Sweden and France, U.S. postmaster, governor of Pennsylvania, the first president of the University of Pennsylvania. And he was a printer. And a writer. And an inventor—bifocals, for example. And even though he was born in Boston, most people think of him as a Philadelphian, because that’s where he spent most of his life. On this episode of Burning Bright, in honor of Ben Franklin, some pieces by Philadelphia writers.
Here’s Joy Gorson’s poem “Call My Name.”
Joy? Your voice falls on my ear
clearly, its dip and rise
waking me –
I answer, Yes?
But you are asleep when I turn,
your breathing slow and deep.
Joy!
Years ago, I heard the urgent timbre
of my mother’s voice.
I woke to answer, the difference being
I could not see her departed spirit
in the room with me.
What capricious fold of brain
holds the voices of both the living
and the dead, summons them again
unbidden, with such fidelity
that we must answer,
Yes?
Or can it be the dead still speak,
casting their words like silver lures
to catch our attention? If you
are drawn before me to that circle,
turn, my love, and call my name.
From Passager’s 2013 Poetry Contest issue, Joy Gorson’s “Call My Name.”
Beth Brown Preston said that she wrote this next poem to recall and to celebrate her family’s humble origins as Florida Geechee people. She said, “My father told me stories about his childhood. I gleaned his birth experience from his tales of the family home.” Here’s Beth’s poem “Eye of the Storm: Ocala, Florida, 1914.”
My daddy’s birthday, February 18th, 1914:
the cabin windows rattled and shook
with the coming on of a southern winter squall.
Wide and long the fields of cotton and sugar cane
lay fallow as sleep under a cover of black mud.
Deep fertile ditches ruined by torrents of endless rain.
From the kitchen floated the rich early morning aroma
of my grandpa Caesar frying catfish and slabs of pork bacon.
In the back-room Grandma Mattie was birthing my daddy.
The midwife rolled her sleeves, pulled down thick stockings
from her heavy blue-veined thighs. Her strong arms arched
over Grandma’s heaving aching belly.
She tucked a sharp blade under the shuck mattress:
“Mattie, a knife will ease the woman pains.”
My daddy entered this world in the eye of a winter storm.
His head burst forth first like a ripe mango followed
by the body wet with dew and blood.
His first cry louder, more insistent than the whining wind,
or the staccato wail of a conch shell with news of his birth.
Thunder groaned and lightning cut the morning sky.
The infant was left to suckle on Grandma’s breast.
She named her newborn “James.”
Gazed into his innocent brown eyes.
And in his eyes the reflection of winter storm clouds.
And in her ears the clatter
of hailstones bouncing on the tin roof,
the sound of rain descending
like a chant of dragons.
Beth Brown Preston’s “Eye of the Storm: Ocala, Florida, 1914” from Passager’s 2022 Poetry Contest issue.
Bill Van Buskirk said, “A friend, whose daughter has struggled with schizophrenia for years, told me he’d heard about a strain of marijuana that was having great success as a cure. So he drove to the west coast, loaded the trunk of his car and drove back. A practicing Buddhist and Tai Chi teacher, he has a deep inner life, so it was not hard to imagine his journey as a spiritual one.” Bill’s poem “Grandad’s Trip.”
When he was seventy, he drove in all the way
from California with a trunkful
of marijuana. He’d heard
it was a cure for schizophrenia.
He drove through every kind of state.
Sometimes what he did was called a crime,
sometimes it wasn’t. In some towns folks were wide awake.
In some they tossed and turned in bitter old trances.
He didn’t care. All he wanted was to save someone he loved
from the hunger of her dreams.
The risk was nothing. He didn’t think, he drove.
Once or twice a day he stopped for gas
and a sandwich. When he arrived in Philly
the stash was wilted, the cure of course –
an empty rumor. But that drive,
that endless drive, it changed him.
It changed him into what he’d do,
what he’d always do until the end,
for love.
“Grandad’s Trip,” Bill Van Buskirk, from Passager’s 2023 Poetry Contest issue.
We’ve been listening to poems by Philadelphia writers in honor of Ben Franklin’s birthday. They’re no “a penny saved is a penny earned” or “Fish and visitors stink in three days”—two of Franklin’s enduring proverbs—but they’re darn good, anyway.
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For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Asher, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.
