Re-Solving to do more

I am once again trying to "solve" my inactivity -- my laziness when it comes to writing -- by making a commitment in public to do better. We'll see how well I do.

This time around I want to put some effort into the various poems I began long ago, to polish them up and put them out there. Constructive commentary is always welcome.


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Kinship Shows

Kathy and Eleanor sit
daintily
on the sofa.
Their interacting,
polite arguing,
being individuals,
somehow point up the similarities:
beauty shop hair
ironed print dresses
inflections of their voices
shared blindness.

A gentle breeze and the summer heat
encircle them
and the stories I know.

Their Scottish father came to this coal region--
doing the same work he'd always done--
But in America, work echoing
promise and plenty.
Kathy cared for him until he died at 96
in Smithton
a coal and beer town on the Youghigheny,
where she lived a genteel life.
Yet not.

She and a different sister--Agnes--
married brothers, those Stolting boys.
In the 1930s and 40s,
in that rural Pennsylvania backwater,
Kathy's husband Carl and Eleanor's Frank ran a tavern.
But Carl chose
perhaps not only religiously
to be a minister.
From a barman's to a minister's wife--
perhaps that's why she takes so much
in stride.
Till 94 she lived in Smithton
fortified by the brewery's fumes.
But now,
because her blindness scares him,
her son Roy cares for her.
At 98, in Texas,
she is remote
from home and family.

Rooted still in her rural home
Eleanor is surrounded
by fruit trees and family.
Even blind she bakes
pies
cakes
cobblers
as she always has.
The baby in her family at 93,
she spends her days with daughter Doris Ann
and the extensive generations
who all live nearby.
While she traveled with her husband Frank
to remote places in Europe,
she always remained grounded
not far from where she was born
in her spot in the Laurel highlands.
She looks so much like her mother
who died when Eleanor was just a girl.

As they click their teeth
and dispense firmly loving hugs,
I see them
now, but then too,
as the younger women they once were.
I imagine my grandmother Agnes on the couch there too--
a woman I never knew--
between them

in age, appearance, views--
The lovely Robertson girls
still
ready to take their town by storm.

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I wrote the first draft of this almost ten years ago, so not surprisingly both of these women have since died. This poem is part of a family album of sorts that I have worked at, on and off, over my adulthood. I've decided it is time to resume it and polish it up. I am frustrated, though, that I can't make the tabbing for some of the lines work. But at least the content is there.