Know what you mean about squeezing past Americans of ample girth, Max, or them squeezing past you. Some disconcerting line turns: Latin? We too have conservationist roo cullers I suppose.
Bill
> On 9 Oct 2013, at 11:37 pm, Patrick McManus <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Max Gosh don't know if I have had a civilised conversation with a Mormon
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Max Richards
> Sent: 09 October 2013 02:51
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: 'My Mormon'
>
> My Mormon
>
> The seat by the window was filled
> with a senior American of large build.
>
> Another on the aisle slowly stood aside
> while I squeezed past and in. A long ride
>
> San Francisco to Boston lay ahead -
> cabin staff would keep us watered but not fed.
>
> We all had stuff to read:
> a crime novel on my left, me indeed
>
> Tolstoy on Kindle full of typos and freshness - 'The Cossacks and 'Family
> Happiness';
>
> By the window a newsprint weekly
> all about faith service and Salt Lake City.
>
> We clenched for take-off, made survey
> of the hilly city and the wide flat bay,
>
> turned inland towards the rising sun.
> We seniors dozed off one by one.
>
> Stirring I saw my Mormon had woken.
> He said we're already over Michigan.
>
> Then told me how good the hunting was
> last weekend with his Utah sons.
>
> Deer hunters are conservationists
> stabilising the numbers of these noble pests.
>
> I might have said how Tolstoy's men
> first missed a boar but got a Chechen
>
> or was it a Tartar? I get confused.
> My Mormon mentioned his family pride -
>
> on both sides ancestors trekked west
> from intolerance through great peril to blest
>
> Utah and the flourishing of their faith.
> We both liked separation of church and state.
>
> Both deplored the power of priests, with hope for reforms from the Latin
> American Pope.
>
> Religions are good while they stick to Love without dogmas handed down from
> above.
>
> I said I was reading how hard it was
> when Lutherans met Aborigines.
>
> They wanted to respect the Aranda
> and bring them in onto the verandah,
>
> school their kids and teach them hymns - and cover their disconcerting
> limbs,
>
> and lock the schoolgirls up at night.
> Learning their language to translate
>
> the Gospels showed the pastors
> Aranda knew eternity from the stars,
>
> divine powers everywhere.
> My Mormon thought time will show
>
> religions all have judeo-christian
> foundations, dispersed by migration
>
> to the ends of the earth. I should ask
> my anthropologist friend how that task
>
> of research was proceeding. We saw
> a Great Lake but not Niagara;
>
> some upstate New York wildernesses,
> the golf courses of Massachusetts,
>
> Boston's Puritan foundations overlaid
> with tribal ways and faiths less staid.
>
> I used to teach 'The Scarlet Letter'.
> America now mostly knows better
>
> and doesn't need my doggerel
> to distinguish natives from the devil.
>
> My Mormon dreams of a holiday trip
> in the South Pacific, letting rip
>
> on the long journey out
> amongst New Zealand's deer and trout
>
> and basking homeward-bound in Sydney
> pleasures and multicultural Hawaii.
>
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