beautiful ohio

I was up in Ohio for a few days, for a funeral--my mother's father.

That man was born in 1915, and, with the exception of three or four years during World War II, spent his whole life in that town. It was the place where he was born, raised, married, worked, and died. It was the city where my mother was born. It was the place where we buried him, and where the birds flew out of the trees when the twenty-one gun salute was fired on Saturday morning.

We weren't particularly close, and our lives are very different, in many ways, but here's a poem that makes me think of him, and men, and work, and the state in which we both were born.

Beautiful Ohio
James Wright

Those old Winnebago men
Knew what they were singing.
All summer long and all alone,
I had found a way
To sit on a railroad tie
Above the sewer main.
It spilled a shining waterfall out of a pipe
Somebody had gouged through the slanted earth.
Sixteen thousand and five hundred more or less people
In Martins Ferry, my home, my native country,
Quickened the river
With the speed of light.
And the light caught there
The solid speed of their lives
In the instant of that waterfall.
I know what we call it
Most of the time.
But I have my own song for it,
And sometimes, even today,
I call it beauty.