Now and Then
I worry about running out of onions
the way my dad worried
about running out of flashlights and batteries
and because he lived through The Great Depression
he had a store in his A Street basement
Now we hoard toilet paper and wear masks on planes
We think every splinter could be a Lyme carrying tick
We miss having a president like Franklin Roosevelt
and because my dad fought in WWII
and saw the holocaust at Buchenwald first hand
he drank too much back when PTSD
was known as “shell shocked”
and ending fascism was a worthy cause
Now we drink water in bottles that leach plastic
that stays in our bodies and poisons our DNA
We march to protest wars for profits
and worry about new autocrats
super floods, fires and storms
Sometimes I pull the bedcovers up over me
like my dad hunched down behind his Long Tom
I buy two bags of onions at once
and try not to burn pans when I cook
Today the power went out
and I looked for a flashlight
I thought about buying potatoes
two bags at once
and maybe some canned goods
like my dad had in his cellar
because those are important too
_________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United
June 27th, 2021 12:42 am
The more things change…? I guess we all keep doing the best we can, regardless. There’s a certain doggedness in the pictures you paint, old and new, which I think is no bad thing.
June 27th, 2021 2:19 am
Sadly we tend to forget the trials of the past unless of course it affected us deep down and then they never leave our sides. Living through wars or great calamities can do this to us.
June 27th, 2021 9:10 am
perhaps there’s a certain siege mentality in all of us now, with so many “..ism”s around, and we are not sure which one is going to rear its ugly head soon.
i agree with Rosemary that there is a certain doggedness in the images you painted, and that’s not a bad thing too.
June 27th, 2021 11:27 am
I smiled at the truisms in your poem. My mother kept spare cash under the carpet in the guest bedroom!
June 27th, 2021 11:32 am
Things don’t change that much, do they? Details of the worries, but not the roots of them. I would hope Old Egg is correct in living through calamities never leave our sides. At least in the US, I think people will choose to forget the pandemic, and the lessons they should keep with them.
June 27th, 2021 11:35 am
And now we have a new Cold War being fought in cyber space. Who needs nuclear when we can just pull the plug on each other?
June 27th, 2021 11:36 am
Your poem brings so many thoughts to mind. When I was growing up, in the Dominican Republic, we went through sugar and flower shortages. I remember my mother’s face when she try to explain why we had to walk kilometers and kilometers, in order to get sugar from different towns–they were rationing it, so one could only buy 1 pound per family, and my mother was always so worried that we would run out. Today, I guess we’ve been doing the same thing with hand sanitizer and such.
June 27th, 2021 4:15 pm
What we lived through with our parents when we were young stays with us for a lifetime. I was just remembering the “soap sock” that my Great-Depression-surviving parents had when I was young. Bits of bath soap too small to use were put in an old sock, and we soaped ourselves up with it. (I hasten to add that this is a memory only, not a present-day practice in my house!)
June 28th, 2021 9:57 am
It’s always good to be aware of these patterns of lack and what they say about society at that moment. The hope is we learn something during those moments. Something we can pass on to the next generation when they too will face a trial of lack.
June 28th, 2021 10:20 am
And some of us worry when we don’t have anything to worry about. Just waiting for the other shoe to drop. We live in anxious times but I guess people always have.
June 30th, 2021 1:19 am
Wonderful poem, full of old and new connections.
July 1st, 2021 11:16 pm
I follow your Thursday 13 post here and I really enjoy your poem. It shows how changes keep happening around us.