[Newspoetry] A Frosty Inauguration -- Re Play

[Donald L Emerick]

When Kennedy took the office of President, I was only twelve, near ending my childhood.

The Principal of our two-room school wanted us kids to see the inauguration.  It would be an historic moment, he said -- prophesying that we would never forget the experience of seeing the event.  He was right, at least so far as my own memory goes.

As school was in session, the Principal -- who also taught the upper room grades (fifth to eighth) -- invited us all over to his house, to see the event.  Our local streets were chilly and in no way resembled the frigid breezy cold snowy avenues in Washington so far away.  How far were they -- farther than the next nearest star -- so far you would have to travel by light for years -- so far that only by television could we countrymen ever reach them.

But, he waved at us, spoke to us, when his speech started up: "My fellow countrymen..."  He must have known where we were, what we were doing, how rapt and attentive we were.  As he spoke, the poetry of his puffs of words formed a fog of breath that hung in the air a moment before vanishing.  I was thrilled and excited.  I asked one of the other students next to me, one who had also collapsed into the caved-in couch, to pass the popcorn, please -- and mind the soda glass down by my foot -- don't knock it over.

Ah, what a grand and glorious speech it was!  I saved a copy of it when they printed it in the big city papers -- and a few years later I bought it as my first LP: "Major Speeches of JFK".  I even thought that I could mimic his cadences so that the roll of his words would stimulate a similar movement in my own thinking-into-speeching.  It never happened, though, and it was not just the natural accident of a naive lack of a charming native accent.

The other moment of the inauguration was when the Poet himself spoke -- a sun-glaring-back, blinding moment.  I'd never heard Frost speak so eloquently before.  I'd never heard him speak before.  His tones, his voice disappointed me -- he didn't sound like me at all -- even though I had been reading his poems for years in grammar school.  Who doesn't know the sounds of stopping by a woods on a snowy evening, or of playing one prong of a fork and no other?  A poet condenses light, into his blackholes, shredding images, emitting radiation, all of this dark matter from the swallowing, sucking destruction comes back into fine black print, in the traces of words cast into stones that instantly decay into the ruins of sights, sounds, moments.

Oh, since then, I've read the gift of rite, the gift outright he gave us.  It was all too glorious and it seems a shame to even note that the Principal later lost his job, for pedastry, but not pedantry, with that boy who so politely passed me the popcorn.