Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. Over 20,000 daily subscribers, 7,000 archived posts, 73 million hits and 5 million visitors.
Jose Padua: Remember
Remember all ye tedious millionaires the bent
honeysuckle whose white flowers bloom in the
late spring. Remember the burden of the books
you burn, the smoke that stains the glass you
look through every morning and the false smiles
you pawn like old guitars with your quick and
clean motions. The less we know the easier you
breathe. The less we know the easier it is for you
to pass the blame. What I remember is the land-
scape of a place I never knew the name of. We
were somewhere, in the country, getting out of
our ’59 Chevy Impala, and the ground felt more
secure beneath my feet then, and I walked straight
ahead to a house where I saw people inside, speaking.
Copyright 2024 Jose Padua
.
Photograph by Jose Padua
Vox Populi 
When I return to the place where I grew up, I easily get lost. The house I was raised in is still there but has been turned into condos. I’m learning the hard way that change is ubiquitous.
LikeLike
Yes, I feel the same way when I return to Houston where I grew up. Nothing is the same. Fields and forests have been destroyed and replaced with shopping centers and freeways.
>
LikeLike
From that opening admonition on down, we know we are listening to someone who speaks with authority, tenderness, passion, compassion, self awareness. It’s not just harangue. The turn to his own delicately drawn memory makes it all the more powerful. Yes, all the foregoing, but also this. We can all find such refuge and strength in our own lives, it seems to imply or at least allow.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I love Jose’s poems for their subtlety and music.
>
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thank you. Too many memories of what was and soon I will have to leave the land I tried to turn back. Removed the lawn. Planted native plants now visited by so many birds and butterflies. My labyrinth is richly overgrown and I assume who comes next will cut down the pines and Palo verdes and toyons and replace them with grass and cement. The power lines showed up years ago overnight and the green hills are now housing tracts.
LikeLiked by 2 people
A beautiful prose poem, Barbara. Thank you!
>
LikeLike
How heart-fully I agree with you Dean, and Jose… Thank you for that “bent”(!!) honeysuckle, for “What I remember is the land-
scape of a place I never knew the name of” — In Belgium there was a small beach tree wood close to where I lived in my 20ies (61 years ago!) where the whole surface of the ground turned into this perfumed & glorious carpet of wild blue hyacinths with great patches of lily of the valley. Children would come to pick flowers there for Mother’s Day. In the early 80ies, and in 4 days, it was gone. Every single 100 year old copper beaches. It is now half a parking lot, & half a Home Depot kind of store. My eyes slightly teary as I type this.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I meant Sean, not Dean! Sorry!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I know what you mean, Sean. I grew up on the outskirts of Houston on the bayou where there was a forest of live oak and hickory. As a boy, I watched the bulldozers clear whole swaths of the forest and fill in the wetlands to build housing developments and shopping centers. Now, hurricanes come through every few years and the neighborhoods go underwater in a “natural disaster.” I believe that our civilization is unsustainable…
LikeLiked by 1 person
We just lost an old riot of green, a place along the road they clear-cut and not a single effort to save a single tree. There were old ones.
Now in a place I live along the road to town I must look away as I pass by. I don’t know where there is secure footing amid my kind. They revile me.
LikeLiked by 2 people