ACROSS THE FACE OF THE STORM by Jerome R. Adams (Colombia)
(EXPLAINING HOW YOU BUILD YOUR LIFE): IT TAKES FOREVER because life it built from the inside out, from the bottom…
In early 1911, Isabel Cooper, 17, and her 15-year-old brother, Frederick. they leave their Georgetown home after the sudden death of their Mexican mother. They are determined to find their father, a college professor who – like many American leftists – had joined the Mexican revolution a few months earlier. They travel by train, stagecoach, and wagon, at first put off by what they see of turn-of-the-century American South. But they soon learn of the quiet dignity of their mother’s homeland. After an ugly incident not of their making, they escape the federales with the help of Pepe, a lad of many talents. He leads them to refuge with a ragtag militia on its way to join Carranza’s Army of the North, commanded by a woman known as La Maestra.
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After service in the Peace Corps in Colombia, Jerome Adams went to work for The Charlotte (NC) Observer, a daily newspaper. He went on to a career as a freelance writer and teacher. He hopes it was his wanderlust that has moved his four children to live and work in Nigeria, Albania, Italy, and Costa Rica.
Previously he has published among others Greasers and Gringos: The Historical Roots of Anglo-Hispanic Prejudice (2006), and Liberators and Patriots of Latin America: Biographies of 23 Leaders from Dona Marina (1505-1530) to Bishop Romero (1917-1980), (2010)
This is quite a story of a PCV’s life and his service in Columbia and his subsequent life as a Charlotte NC OBSERVER employee and then a free-lancer, teacher, and popa and later his 4 kids who as this review says were moved to live and work in Albania, Costa Rica, Italy, and Nigeria. I gotta read this one and the two other books of his, both focujssing on Anglo-Latinex prejudice and the heros of Latin America.
Adams’ story as reviewed here above is a tale of hope and my poem may be seen as a metaphor for it:
THE PHOENIX
by Edward Mycue
All that noisy night the phoenix flamed
crackling embers into singeing song
scorching fog, fuchsia, western laurel tree
razing memories of my flower years,
smoke clouding what passes, these keys of flesh,
time the phoenix entered the sun dance
fragmenting, shattering, grinding-down
my tired half-dreams of a failed dream,
scooping from that mist of muffled bones
one frail and fragrant puff of finished fuse.
Fleeing, finding stars, sky, sirens screaming,
years turn, hope spins again into morning,
so what could never end might yet still come again.
. Little Lifetimes
Children crush crackers between stones
celebrating luck and joy
seeing with ears, breathing music from trees, flowering
in pure deliciousness
awakening graves, unarmed against the rain. In time — silence:
stoning sterile trees,
praying the dead will sleep between the swollen roots.
The wind rushes in saying hold my ground, carve
your own road — the design that develops.
Now a face begins to emerge seeking air
examining death to discover patterns
in the movements of little lifetimes.
© Copyright Edward Mycue
(EXPLAINING HOW YOU BUILD YOUR LIFE):
IT TAKES FOREVER
because life it built
from the inside out,
from the bottom up but
you do it upside down from
the top like you’re digging
a hole when you’re really
building a frame and
hanging a skin around
–that is, form the inside out
when it’s upside down and
the light isn’t so good
and everything has to be
tilted and turned. It’s hard.
________________________________
(C) Copyright Edward Mycue