Category Archives: Poetry

O Let My People Go

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For ten or twenty, thirty years or more
the song was sung before the Civil War

by southern slaves in secret. First a call,
and then a sung response that came from all

around, “O let my people go!” And then
another voice, another poet, sang

out still another call, “Tell King Pharaoh!”
And then, “This world’s a wilderness of woe…”

“O let my people go!” Old Lincoln heard
the sad song sung and gave the legal word:

Abolish evil slavery first here,
and finally across the land. For where

no freedom is for some, at risk we all
will be. Each one must listen for the call:

to set each prisoner free.

– Verse “O Let My People Go” by Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, October 23, 2013

Spirituals! (The first one published in 1861, “O Let My People Go,” was transcribed by a YMCA missionary sent to help escaped slaves at Fort Monroe. –Dena J. Epstein, “Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War,” Univ of Illinois Press, 1977, 2003.)

Editor’s Note: Harriet Tubman was the Moses of the Underground Railroad.

Our hearts can also fly

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Verse – “The Kite Flew All Night”

If the wind is steady–
on these plains it often
is– and if the dacron
line has not been eaten
by those grey and tiny
field mice that slip into
my small storage shed, and
if the stake is driven
firmly in the ground, and
if the rip-stop nylon
like a parachute can
hold, and if the fiber-
glass rods bend but do not
break, the sky has color
added and our hearts can
also fly.

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, October 20, 2013

The First Signs of Dementia

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The author of this verse has always had a mental picture of “the grid” of the City of Chicago streets, avenues, and interstates.

The First Signs of Dementia

I cannot see myself on the grid
anymore–the web of avenues,
streets, lanes, and turnpikes. I know the road
I am driving on, but the views
from the height of buzzards are now lost
to my mind’s dim cataractic eye.

Well, at least it happens sometimes. I
hate not knowing when the very last
clear and cogent thought will cross my mind
(double-cross, most likely…) Can there be
exercises for brains? Surgery?
Memory replacement would be kind.

Will I soon not even know my name?
Hell is when all highways are the same.

(Composed while driving on I-57, Urbana to Chicago–but not transcribed while in Work Zones…}

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, October 16, on his way to McCormick Days, the annual three-day Alumni/ae event at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. Steve first mentioned losing his grip on the grid last spring on the drive from Midway Airport to the seminary for the annual gathering of old friends.

Verse – Not a Quilt

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The mid-west farmland seen up close,
the only way it should be seen,
is black, then green, then gold and tan.
The corn comes first in narrow rows,
the soybeans planted next will spread
into a leafy blanket for
a while, then brown and shrivel, dry
and seem to die. The corn is bred
to grow a single ear per stalk.
The harvester has different jaws
to chew each crop and spit the grain
in trucks. The farmers stand and talk
of yield and price, machines and laws.
They seldom look to see a plane…

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, October 16, 2013

NOTE: Views from the Edge found this photo of Amish farmland from Pennsylvania Dutch country.

Amish farmland quilt

Amish farmland quilt

Give up your faith

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“For 40 years,” writes Steve, “I had been a Pastor on college campuses where many students were of the marrying age, and perhaps because I would not accept money for weddings, was often asked to officiate.”

Verse -“Give Up Your Faith”

was what I told several Christians
who were wanting to marry
someone of another Faith.
“It’s the Christian thing to do,”
I said. “Give up what you love
for the person you love.”
(“Remember the Golden Rule?”)

Only a very few became Muslim,
or Buddhist, or Hindu or Jewish,
but I felt those who did were
showing clearly the love of Jesus…
I was glad to be an evangelist.

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, October 11, 2013

Verse – limerick for fall

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When I see a mouse in a room,
I know it will soon meet its doom.
I’m quite a big guy,
But I don’t even try,
I just scream for my wife with a broom!

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, October 11, 2013

Teaching my Daughter how to Drive

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Her brother let the clutch out much too fast
the first time he tried to start up the van
in the parking lot of the store that closed.
I told her how he lurched and jerked and ran
over the orange cones that I took to use
from soccer practice as a parking space.
The VW died, he swore, but tried
again and then again–giving more gas
and slooowly letting up the clutch. She learned
and did the opposite: the engine roared
as she held in the clutch and mashed the gas
pedal to the floor. I yelled to be heard
above the engine noise, “Let up, let up!”
and as she pulled both feet up, the car died,
of course. She threw the keys at me and cried.

She took the class at school and got an “A.”

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, October 9, 2013

Verse – Missing Sunrise

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At long last “Missing Sunrise” saw the light of day early this morning.

The author shared with his audience last evening that he sometimes lies wake in the middle of the night with “compound words” in his head that compose themselves into a verse or poem. “Sleepy-head, lazy-bones, slug-a-bed” was a combination of three such words that had come to him a few days before, but they were just sitting there in in iPhone, not yet born into a verse. When he shared it this morning, he said, “Let no sleeping doggerel lie…”

Verse– Missing Sunrise

Sleepy-head, lazy-bones, slug-a-bed,
where were you when the sun raised its head?
Purple and violet, rosy-red:
you lie there like you’re already dead…
Get up and greet the day! Live instead
of hiding–cat and dog must be fed!
Alarm dinging, birds are singing, led
by sunlight bringing New Love ahead…

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL

Thanks, Steve, for a wonderful evening at last night’s Dialogue here in Minnesota.

Meeting President Bill Clinton

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January 28, 1998

He gave the State of the Union address
the night before, and flew on Air Force One
to our college town in the middle-west
to check out press and public reaction.
(The sex with an intern story made news
the week before.) For six years he had met
not politicians, but “Local Heroes”
at airports (Do-Gooders the Democrat
Party chose.)
Our church worked with homeless men.
As Pastor, I was picked to shake his hand
as he came off the plane (in a long line
with 14 other folks.) He called each one
of us by name. He firmly gripped my hand,
looked in my eyes, pretending to be fine…/

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, January 28, 1988

Steve Shoemaker with President Bill Clinton

Steve Shoemaker with President Bill Clinton

Join Steve next Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church.

Twenty-three

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Uncertain, listening for cues, she gives

One-word responses…can’t tell jokes. But then

after gin and nonsense, alone, she talks

for hours of the boys, teenagers, men

she has had sex with–more than she can count

or remember. She doesn’t know just why

she slept with them except they seemed to want

to. But the abortions…each one is clear

in her mind…each dead perhaps child. Now more

than anything she wants a live baby.

Her job is okay, frustrating, but half

challenging. There and everywhere she hides

her beauty, camouflages hair, breasts, eyes,

to slip unseen…maybe make a new life.

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, September 21, 2013, soon to appear as the speaker at Tuesday Dialogues October 1, 2013 at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, MN.