“Art Invites Disaster”

_____–-quote by Jack Grapes

I was born into the disaster of my parents’ marriage.
How could it be otherwise; he merely twenty, she
merely a year older.

Thank the gods they waited until I was ten to have another
child, so I was able to take care of him. You’ve read
or maybe had the experience of a group of people

standing around an exhibition of rocks. That’s right, rocks,
in a museum, and the artist calls them, “Meditative Art,
the entropic principles of order and decay.”

My mother gathered rocks and built a shrine in a corner
of our living room. Eventually, it wasn’t enough
and she purchased a salamander thinking it a perfect home,

then forgot to feed it. We never found the poor creature,
and us children, we refused to die from neglect. Mother
sang a song no one understood, notes off key,

some haunting melody only she found harmonic.
We grew, walked the rough path of puberty,
finding our way between concepts of construction

versus deconstruction, and left to our natural forces,
we waited to tear down or tear ourselves apart.
Yet, here we still are, old by anyone’s standards.

Stellasue Lee was a host of WordStream at WDVX, Knoxville, TN. She was founding editor of RATTLE, and is now editor Emerita. Dr. Lee received her PhD from Honolulu University. Winner of The Grand Prize of Poetry to Aide Humanity by Al Falah in Malaysia, she now teaches privately and has students all over the globe.