We’d need a fire to survive in the wild,
the Boy Scout Handbook advised.
We’d need flint, tinder and twine.
Like Neanderthals we’d squat to practice
scraping sticks upon sticks until friction flamed.
At home our mothers worried
over pressure cookers of mason jars
loaded with green garden beans, pickled
cucumbers, golden kernels of corn.
Calculated shelf spans; estimated portions
for how many mouths, how many days.
The pressure cooker tsk-ticking like a bomb.
The mothers insisting we stand back.
While out in the weeds and brambles beyond
our bedroom windows, our fathers
who art not in heaven swung pick axes
and spades, excavating the clan’s cave
of cinderblock and concrete and steel.
We sat up late in bed with flashlights
and the Boy Scout Handbook, learning
to tie snares and bait traps. Learning
to chip flints. To cook meat on an open spit.
Learning to expect the worst
was headed straight at us, as it had been
since the terror of the mastodons. Since volcanoes
belching molten rock. Since the first
dull thud of clubs splashed blood.
Since the first stone axes broke bones.
___
As founding editor of Many Voices Press, Lowell Jaeger compiled Poems Across the Big Sky, an anthology of Montana poets, and New Poets of the American West, an anthology of poets from 11 Western states. His third collection of poems, Suddenly Out of a Long Sleep (Arctos Press) was published in 2009 and was a finalist for the Paterson Award. His fourth collection, WE (Main Street Rag Press) was published in 2010. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Montana Arts Council and winner of the Grolier Poetry Peace Prize. Most recently Jaeger was awarded the Montana Governor’s Humanities Award for his work in promoting thoughtful civic discourse.
Thursday, March 29th, 2012 6:34 am
Categories: Issue 5.4, Poetry
