Author: Martha Vestecka Miller

Dancing Bear came about with the destruction of an earlier painting – a subject I did not want to leave in my portfolio. After tearing apart the painting, I started piecing together the scraps. A delightful memory of a favored character in the children’s tv show “Captain Kangaroo” from the early 1960’s came to mind. Dancing Bear had been reborn.

Sometimes you seem like a dream
that goes away with first morning light.

Blood on the sidewalk and your bright white shirt, tied-dyed your rich red.
Washed away by the gardener, quick to erase the memory
Sorrowful witnesses look away.

Thirteen times he drove his knife as you fought. A squeamish discussion a week before:
quivering “Go for the eyes.” tamped down by “But those things don’t happen in Lincoln.”

The bushes later disturbed again by gloved hands, looking for the knife
where you had laid with your killer

11:30 you watched as your blood seeped away
off the cold table. Slick

The doctors worked but could not stop it, too many holes
Your killer crouched in the alley weeds and bushes,
a snake who had been sent back to his country, only to return again and again – until this last
time.

His hate lashed out against women. Today it was you Katherine, but how many others
before?
He lay coiled in the Police car, sweating.
And as you died within your circle of white coats

I know you saw God
for your real journey had begun.
Earth was just your “Way Station”.

Dad’s old easy chair sits empty in a corner of my mind now. A Colleen recovered recliner with a pink and yellow woven Mexican blanket laying softly on the back of the plump chair.

Waiting.

Found in the room where Bob laughs, winks and dreams as his 33 RPM LPs scratch along their circular highways, melting the day’s worries into dust in the Western sun. White specks floating and disappearing in front of red velvet curtains.

The Tiger Oak veneer player piano, which no one is strong enough to pedal any more, stands stately against the West wall, watching. Black boxes with yellowed torn titles squat above. Worn piano rolls top the lid, broken by discolored high school graduation photos.

Then, as the digital clock flips to 1:30 a Nebraska game sparks on. The quiet now broken by a slamming front door, then jumping, yelling, groaning and clapping. Jason’s barks drown out the announcers and calls of the referees. Bob’s best chum’s are Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne, win or lose.

Later, while the rest of us take to the streets, Lawrence Welk, the Lennon Sisters, accordions and old music fill the first floor. Notes dancing through the dining, living, hallway, pantry and kitchen. Mom relaxes on the loveseat, done with her cooking and dishes; her feet stretched and crossed.

As the dark finally sinks through the window, Mom draws the shade and makes her way upstairs. After a last call to Dad, she disappears into the hall while he watches the late show until his head, bobbing reluctantly drops.

And the easy chair gives a sigh, holding him in its hand. It smiles easily and beams along with the black and white broadcast bands. The day’s end programming begins to hum. The TV room is satisfied.

A certain kind of insanity darkly blossoms in the U.S. at the sputtering close of Covid.

Madness, fed on two years of frustration, erupts through young men who slaughter unsuspecting adults and children.

Bullet-proof backpacks sell quickly in the “Back to School” shelves while parents shudder.

Weekly shoppers look twice for escape routes as they pass through sleepy grocery store aisles.

What secret hate metastasizes the weakened brains of youth? Is an insidious misfire responsible for the release of this new design to destroy? A moment’s notoriety?

And as the pandemic shrinks like a hurricane hitting landfall, will the vicious derangement also come to a close? Will the hate dissolve back into rare atrocities or has a newly discovered cancer taken root? Yet, “The wound remains.” (Rose Kennedy) And “only time will tell.” (anon)

“2020”

The year my hair turned from brown to silver”

Flapping, alligator skin swings from my arms and pathetic legs,

and the silver hair that 2020 had unnaturally bleached, springs crazy from the diving board of my head to float

to the bathroom floor.

Outward signs of a poisonous year which some had survived, as others had withered…internally shattered.

The secret enemy, who dissolved family parties into food for refrigerated meat lockers. A devil that smiled as

its deadly talons often proved too quick even for the morticians’ perpetual fires.

It sucked new life from each innocent and eager conversation. It waited for victims to simply pass through a

flume of infected air, eager to work its deadly magic into a new host.

Survivor lines crowd many faces now, as the guilty living try to pretend the deadly year hadn’t happened. And

they sometimes fill the silence between words with nervous laughter.

No amount of moisturizer can reduce the horror which will remain, and as I look into the mirror I see a woman

who reflects an age in which numbers no longer matter.