We’ve been looking at voices from the poetic margins this month in the Weekly Poem series, & I’m concluding this with a short poem by Josephine Miles. Ms Miles, who was also a distinguished academic—the first woman to receive tenure at University of California, Berkeley, in 1947—was a poet of the everyday, which she approached with wit & insight; her poems also really defy categorization in terms of “school”; she had quite a unique voice, & an unerring eye for detail.
Tomorrow probably will be a day off here at Robert Frost’s Banjo central—not 100% on that, but that’s the likely course of events. This will be a busy Saturday—my monthly marathon Farmer’s Market gig (with triple digit temps predicted—yikes!) as well as some visiting & possibly the Adams County Rodeo in the evening. If we do go to the rodeo I’ll try to write something up for Monday.
Hope you enjoy this short but pithy poem about exclusion & acceptance, & I’d encourage you to look into Ms Miles’ works; they are a largely undiscovered treasure.
Ride
It's not my world, I grant, but I made it.
It's not my ranch, lean oak, buzzard crow,
Not my fryers, mixmaster, well-garden.
And now it's down the road and I made it.
It's not your rackety car but you drive it.
It's not your four-door, top speed, white-wall tires,
Not our state, not even, I guess, our nation,
But now it's down the road, and we're in it.
Josephine Miles