Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2021
Call Me Ishmael Gayle Compton Once I believed in Endymion. Once Keats, the bard of joy, sang to me in "mused rhyme." I read Moby Dick in a front porch swing and heard the sea's rolling symphony beneath the swinging bridge. Once my mother drew water and the rusty voice of the well chain was the Pequoid's farewell to Nantucket. Hanging off a C & O coal gon, I blew in at the Cape, bearded, unbathed and swarthy. With my clothes in a cardboard box I rode the Greyhound bus to the mills of East Chicago, Indiana. I saw hellfire trundled on an ingot buggy and breathed the sulphurous breath of Satan.
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