David Anthony Sam
“Diogenes in the Rain”
How often I have walked or driven past the apparently homeless men and women as they lay on a sidewalk, huddled in a doorway, held up a cardboard sign that phrased an unhappy biography asking for alms. We all want to pretend that they are so Other that we cannot fall into their fate, that we are safe from poverty, madness, despair, or substance abuse. And in these heartless times when “leaders” celebrate their inner Scrooge, it is fair game to blame these humans for their lives. Yes, they made choices−but we all have choices made for us, too.
Rather than moralizing directly, I prefer to try to imagine my way into the Other, to acknowledge that the distance between one human’s experience and another is not so great. Even if we all are individual, our biographies have first and last chapters that begin and end the same. With echoes of “A Christmas Carol” and the Christian myth, I try my empathy against the indifference of our time and the moral poverty of our fear. Diogenes, the Cynic, in the shape of a raged man, holds a light before our faces, searching for an honesty that speaks to our common humanity.
Rather than moralizing directly, I prefer to try to imagine my way into the Other, to acknowledge that the distance between one human’s experience and another is not so great. Even if we all are individual, our biographies have first and last chapters that begin and end the same. With echoes of “A Christmas Carol” and the Christian myth, I try my empathy against the indifference of our time and the moral poverty of our fear. Diogenes, the Cynic, in the shape of a raged man, holds a light before our faces, searching for an honesty that speaks to our common humanity.
“Rite”
My mother died in 2010 at the age of 91. I have been processing this loss since, and likely will until I myself become inanimate. Here are the fragments of memory and experience that hint at how profoundly she shaped me in more ways than genetics. My sisters and I going through the remains of her life to glean tokens to display at her funeral. A collage of photos from the child to the woman in the striking red dress standing in a doorway a few years before her divorce. The three of us going through her belongings to decide which each of us would keep as amulets of memory.
My mother led a heroic but quiet life: The first ever in her family to gain a high school diploma. The poor daughter of Polish immigrants who served as a maid for years before WWII and the nurse cadet program gave her a profession. A divorce at a time when women could not own a credit card making it hard for her to have an independent life and her victory in doing so. I hope that there is something universal in this specific remembrance−that it touches what is a loss we all face unless we predecease our parents. But I also hope in a small way “Rite” truly celebrates the remarkable woman that mothered me.
My mother led a heroic but quiet life: The first ever in her family to gain a high school diploma. The poor daughter of Polish immigrants who served as a maid for years before WWII and the nurse cadet program gave her a profession. A divorce at a time when women could not own a credit card making it hard for her to have an independent life and her victory in doing so. I hope that there is something universal in this specific remembrance−that it touches what is a loss we all face unless we predecease our parents. But I also hope in a small way “Rite” truly celebrates the remarkable woman that mothered me.
David Anthony Sam’s poetry has appeared in over 70 publications and he has four collections. With degrees from Eastern Michigan University (BA, MA) and Michigan State University (PhD), Sam lives now in Virginia with his wife and life partner, Linda, and in 2017 retired as president of Germanna Community College. He was the featured poet in The Hurricane Review (2016) and Light: A Journal of Photography and Poetry (2017). Finite to Fail: Poems after Dickinson, was 2016 Grand Prize winner of GFT Press Chapbook Contest after which he began serving as GFT’s Poetry Editor. www.davidanthonysam.com
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