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Barbara Hamby: Ode to Red and Speedy
“Bernice,” says my mother when I ask her who sent
the Christmas card signed Red and Speedy,
and fifty years later I ask her if Bernice was Red or Speedy,
and she says, “I don’t know,” her voice like a raspy
accordion, but I wait till she warms up, and then she starts
singing, so I learn that even though Bernice
had red hair, she was probably Speedy, because she
never stopped, unlike my father, her younger brother,
who was perhaps one of the most relaxed people ever to live
outside a Buddhist monastery, but his sister
was in motion, loved buying houses and remodeling them,
by profession a beautician, her dark auburn hair
in a perfect French twist, and she always drove a Buick,
often coordinating the colors of her outfits
with her cars, sometimes convertibles which led to filmy
chiffon scarves of baby blue or sea green.
But who was Red? “Maybe that was the one she married
for a few weeks,” my mother says. “She had seven
husbands, her first when she was 13 or 14.” When I was ten,
Bernice and her current husband visited us,
and all I remember was her slim grey suit, a frothy pink dicky
at the neck. I’d never seen anything so elegant
in my born-again household. There’s a photo of Bernice
in her twenties at a carnival with a caption that reads
Feeling No Pain. Later she became a Bible-wielding
Christian, to the dismay of her final husband,
a former low-level mafioso from Miami who was famous
for burying thousands of dollars in coffee cans
but not sealing them and digging up the loot to find the bills
had rotted. “Wait a minute,” my mother says, “Maybe
Bernice was Red,” and I think of all my nicknames: Miss Astor,
Mole, Coco, Babster, Dharma Belle, or was it Bell?
Who can remember all the selves stuffed into the miraculous
sack of skin? Her full name was Bernice Minerva,
a glorious moniker coined by my grandfather, who was murdered
when my dad was five and Bernice ten. There’s a photo
of him looking like Rasputin, and here’s a panorama of Bernice’s
seven grooms, nameless now but who lived
in Technicolor once upon a time, and someone finds a photo
of me and you fifty years from now without a caption,
so here’s to Red and Speedy, whoever you were.
From On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (Pitt, 2014). Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author and the University of Pittsburgh Press
Barbara Hamby is the author of many collections of poetry. She and her husband David Kirby edited the poetry anthology Seriously Funny. She teaches at Florida State University where she is distinguished university scholar.
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Poems that are portraits are among my favorites, and Barbara’s are very good indeed.
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She really is great, isn’t she? Her poems are full of music and energy, and sometimes, as here, they are genuinely funny.
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What a perfect “upper” to remind us all that life is more than an election.
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Exactly why I wanted to post this poem today. Thank you, Mandy.
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I enjoy a colorful family saga, told breathlessly. It’s a glorious tonic for a grim-tinted week. Here’s to the Babster, whatever her moniker willl be in 50 years. The technicolor poet of 2024? The Lucille Belle of the Ball?
Thanks for this getter-upper
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Hahahaha. Thanks, Jim.
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What a delicious poem!
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Isn’t it, though?
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Maybe I will get up. Maybe I’ll stay in bed today, but I think the energy in Barbara’s poem may at least tilt me to the former.
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I love this poem! Bouncing around like those colorful “magic balls” my grandson so loved — a poem so busy with life & people & imagery and energy! I am happily out of breath after reading it.
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We all have odd relatives, but Barbara’s family sounds like a traveling troupe of clowns. I love the screwball comedy of this poem.
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What a lovely rollercoaster of a poem. And a line I won’t forget so easily: “Who can remember all the selves stuffed into the miraculous
sack of skin?” Gave me the lift I sorely needed.
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So wonderful!
Life still goes on like a Barbara Hamby poem —indispensable to my sensibilities and hope this moment. Disrupts all my cynicism in the most perfect way beneath these scarlet morning clouds—maybe that’s where Red in the poem wound up and what this business is all about!
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Thanks, Sean. I feel depressed today and this poem lifts me up.
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Michael: I’m among the walking wounded. We’ll commiserate together! Thankyou again for Barbara’s poem. Just what the doctor ordered!
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