Sign Wars
Each autumn brings the Sign Wars once again.
MUSSELLA versus TAYLOR for the crown
of Village Mayor. All the Councilmen
will pick a side while whispers spread through town.
The current, lifelong Clerk will lead a charge
against the young brash Super with a mouth
agrestic. He’s a contractor at large
with trucks that pull his banners. On the south
side of the town he’s landed leery jobs
that hurried through the Zoning Board Appeals.
The pumpkins ripen. Corn frosts on the cobs.
We’ll soon see how the voting body feels:
whether or not they deem their roads too rough
or if the Whaley Dam is up to snuff.
Super: Town Supervisor
Whaley Dam: a dam in England that partially collapsed in 2019 due to lack of maintenance, leading to the evacuation of thousands of people.
Stray Boy
I won five-bucks at nickel-pitch.
_I played a little bingo.
The craft-fair vendors weren’t rich.
_I bought a tchotchke dingo.
I chucked a baseball at a plate
_and dunked a fireman.
He took it well, was not irate.
_I rode upon a tram.
I sprayed a pistol in a race
_and won a Golden Fish.
The carny had a tattooed face.
_I craved a deep-fried dish.
But all my money I had burned
_on normalcy and fun.
I’m such a dope; I haven’t learned.
_But what is done is done.
I found a dumpster. Like a snake,
_I slithered right inside.
I found a last-night’s funnel-cake
_and gobbled it with pride.
All of the kids are heading home.
_They probably have a fridge.
But I will spend the night alone
_beneath a highway bridge.
Reid McGrath lives and writes in the Hudson Valley Region of New York.
The “Whaley Dam” in England was not the Dam I was thinking of, but I suppose that works too! The Whaley Lake Dam in Holmes, NY, and the water-level of said lake after the dam’s restoration, has been the matter of much controversy in my small little town.
The two poems are cleverly paired, Reid. “Sign Wars” creates the feeling of fall in a small town, where local elections do (in terms of contractor hiring) and don’t (in terms of longstanding ways of agricultural life) make much of a difference. This is the scene where you place “Stray Boy.” It’s heartbreaking to think of a child lacking home and food, slipping through whatever community help networks there are. Where I live near Los Angeles, he would not be alone: under-the-bridge encampments tend to be populous and dangerous for children. Your stray is living by a country boy’s wits: using a nickel to win five dollars, then spending it all on boyhood “normalcy and fun” but forgetting he needs to eat. His solution for that in the dumpster works for the moment, but stray dogs and cats lead short lives. God help the independent-minded boy!
Stray Boy is indeed heartbreaking, and indicative of these times, where there often isn’t even a safety net left to slip through, and where those experiencing such hardships are deemed to be the architects of their own circumstances and therefore undeserving of help. And yet Stray Boy’s snapshot doesn’t preach to us. Instead it shows us vividly what often goes on unseen to us in our society.
As for sign wars, although there’s much levity in the piece, there is an underlying seriousness.
Thanks for the reads, Reid.
Doesn’t anyone notice that these two poems are comic?
The first one spoofs the petty, localized politics of some one-horse town in the sticks, with all the corruption and competitive backbiting that are endemic to such places. The second one is an amusing picture of some kid having fun, indulging all the silly cravings the can be satisfied at an amusement park, and being heedless of the consequences.
What is this impulse that some commenters here have about needing to find a deeply serious and sobering “message” or “meaning” in every single poem? Not all poems are utterances from the Delphic oracle.
Although Sign Wars is comic, its timing does give pause for thought. As for Stray Boy, even the title clues the reader in. The boy is ‘stray’, as in a dog on the streets without someone to look after and feed him. This boy living under a highway bridge, instead of spending the money he wins on food, decides to enjoy the normalcy other children experience at a funfair (an impermanent carnival / craft- fair is chosen for a reason). This part of the poem makes the reader smile at a kid doing what kids do best, having innocent fun. But unlike other boys his age, afterwards, Stray Boy has to face the reality of his life, of dumpster diving for food and a homeless, famiy-less existence of sleeping under a highway bridge. Rather than being comic, this poem of an unnamed (again for a reason) homeless child is tragic, and again, well timed.
Paul, your left-liberal assumptions are showing again. Why does the timing of “Sign Wars” give you “pause for thought”? Is it merely because tomorrow (November 3) is election day in many places? That means you’re reading the poem not as a fictive artifact but as a propaganda piece for thoughts that you like. What you’re saying is really this: “I don’t like political corruption, and I don’t like politicians lying and playing dirty, and I don’t like the rough-and-tumble of political maneuvering and manipulation, and I’m glad this poem has painted a negative picture of the same.”
This is even more obvious in your take on “Stray Boy.” You’ve turned a comic poem about a resourceful street urchin (he manages to find something to eat in a dumpster, and knows that it is smart to shelter under a bridge) into a pious lament about homelessness. This isn’t Blake’s poem about the Chimney Sweep — its a picaresque poem about a clever member of the lower classes.
“Sign Wars” is such a timely and interesting subject for a sonnet!
Thank you all. You are all right, I believe. I don’t know if I delved too deeply into the meanings behind these poems, at least not consciously. I was trying to paint two pictures.
“Sign Wars” was written in the same vein as Patrick Kavanagh’s “Epic,” where the narrator states: “I have lived in important places, times,” and goes on to describe the most provincial and seemingly trivial events, until, ironically, Homer’s ghost whispers: “I made the Iliad from such a local row. God’s make their own importance.” “Sign Wars” is about some local rows, and it is both important in what it says about the nature of egotistical politicians who think these squabbles are the center of the universe, in which they function (in their own heads) like little gods, and not important at all, insofar as in the grand scheme of things these elections do very little to move the needle, and they are not little gods. The poem is a spoof as well as a microcosm of a macrocosm.
I got the title for “Stray Boy” from my son who is obsessed with boys who get to wander around without any parents. He calls them “stray boys.” After attending the local summer carnival, I thought about what an actual country “Stray Boy” might do at said carnival. If he’s slipped through any nets or networks there to assist him, he’s done so willfully. He’s not lacking in self-reliance. He most likely knows that there are orphanages, social-workers, schools and churches that he could go to. He knows there are small jobs and tasks he could perform for a monetary reward. But who wants to? While his belly rumbles and he pines for a fridge and a family, he doesn’t have one, and he’ll have to deal with it. But on his own terms. Maybe he’ll go to work on a farm tomorrow. Who knows?
Reid, I really enjoyed both poems, but it is “Stray Boy” that has caught my attention. There is something Dickensian about this poem. It taps into the cruel truth with a wry eye. The boy reminds me of Jack Dawkins – the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist. Reid, thank you!