Robert Demaree- Two Poems

MOVING PICTURES

Looking at old postcards

Of the town where  I grew up,

Sorrowful Rust Belt burg

On the Schuylkill River:

Two theaters on High Street—

Can you picture it?

Here’s the Hippodrome,

Double-feature Westerns on Saturday:

Ten-year-olds, we called them the

Calvary shows.

And here’s the Strand.

Do they still have ushers at the movies?

Do they wear maroon uniforms

With thick shoulder stuffing?

At sixteen I got a job there

Unbeknownst to my parents,

River of No Return,

With Marilyn Monroe,

Another candle in the wind.

MUSING

I was reading today

Of an author I’d enjoyed,

Former novelist he was called.

Occurred to me to wonder

If one could be a former poet.

Or a retired poet,

Or perhaps a non-practicing poet,

Like a non-practicing

Physician, or Christian,

Or an inactive volcano,

If not extinct.

Robert Demaree is the author of four collections of poems, including Fathers and Teachers, April 2007, and  Mileposts, October 2009, both published by Beech River Books, and Things He Thought He Already Knew, published online in 2007 by Slow Trains. The winner of the 2013 Burlington Writers Club Poetry Award, he is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, where he lives four months of the year. He has had over 650 poems published or accepted by 150 periodicals. For further information see http://www.demareepoetry.blogspot.com