Sample Poems by Pamela Harrison

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The Usual Mistakes

1968. Railing against injustice, Stokely Carmichael lofts an angry fuck you into our girlish college crowd, a verdict on our well-tooled lives four years of reasoned essays cannot right. We are going to graduate after all, parade into the waiting world the chaplain opines our “patience, persistence, and politeness” will pry open like an oyster for its pearl. After Stokely, we stay up late, talking, wanting to take a stand. Some argue for a sit-in at the library. But “real life” is just a rumor, and anyway, we insist on making the usual mistakes. On the eve of our Commencement, we conceive a treasure hunt set in the new science construction. Prowling around searching for a clue, Nancy steps backwards into the uncovered shaft of a sewer drain. When I hear the others calling, and peer down twenty feet to see Nan lying on the wet floor of the well, I hear her words waver like lost streamers up the chute, saying she is “cold, so cold.” Running to our room, I tear the comforter from my bed and race back to throw it down, by then, to the medics working to secure Nan’s broken neck. All patience and politeness, we huddle in the dorm all night waiting for some word, and I keep insisting everything will be all right. After all, I heard Nan talking. Like talking can save you. Like words can keep you alive.

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Hospital Whites

I watched the angry crowd throw bricks and taunts at Boston’s Best, who, before they drew their billy clubs, hid their badges under Kevlar vests. Closing behind a wall of plastic shields, they marched ahead and had their way. Clouds of tear gas blew grey across the littered Square and shop fronts’ shattered glass, then lifted toward us on the acrid wind—I slammed the window shut. You were gone past midnight, sewing heads in your hospital whites, returning home when all the streets were empty and bright blood dried to brown.

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Chica and Ché

We shinny over a chain link fence to camp on the beach below condos under construction. It’s such a steal, we celebrate our holiday’s end with a restaurant meal: two Mai Tai’s, and I walk into a tree. At dawn, the sea stumbles in to snore at our feet, and flocks of yellow hard hats whistle and tease when we wriggle like pupas from our sleeping bag. In slept-in jeans and dirty bandanas, we stand in line to board the plane back home. My right eye is swollen, a riot of blue and green, but slugging trees don’t fly with Security Officer Moaks. Sniffing something suspicious, he would like to know our business and our last address. No, sir, I have never seen this man without his beard. Squinting now, Moaks informs us that hi-jackers have commandeered a jet that’s roasting on some runway in the desert. And what have we got here? A Swiss army knife? Moaks confiscates our camp stove, too. But, hey, it’s Hawaii, and 1972. My bearded man is a medical intern, I his year-long bride, and nobody has an inkling yet of what earnest young men with beards might do. Moaks reroutes our gear to Seattle’s sniffing dogs, orders us to mind our revolutionary p’s and q’s, and seats us for surveillance by the bulkhead. Our presence there throbs among the other passengers like illicit sex. Eyes slide right and left. Whispers sizzle up the aisle. He gets his nickname, I get mine.

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Maine View

Past the windows of our bus: blueberry rackers bent at harvest, sway-back barns, moss-skinned rocks, ducks, and muskeg. Two boys whack canary yellow balls down a narrow tarmac, a peeling steeple points above a sign that warns “After death, JUDGMENT” and birds flock to an old woman casting Wonder Bread like manna upon the green weeds of her yard. It’s all here and gone. Soon the lean of the trees shows which way the wind blows in from the sea. And though the road curves on cue toward our present destination, a harbor stitched with masted ships, it would be absurd to think we’ve arrived at anything more than a makeshift conclusion, a slip-knot tied at the end of a long day’s ride. How agree on what we saw? Had you and I stood for long at the top of that road where those boys played golf with a baseball bat, the day would have felt very different. Had we flown like pigeons around that deserted church, we could never spy the truth of the story the headlines crow of the pastor arrested for lewd conduct in a far city, who dove yesterday over a rock falls—leaving his wife and congregation to ask how he got from here to there: a motion which, from their point of view, must have seemed as random as the drift of milkweed seeds in the wake of a departing bus. But from his, must have felt as irresistible as the tide that floods the bowl of this secluded bay, as necessary as any choice he ever made.