My poem The Ukelele was a finalist for the Atlanta Review's 2011 International Poetry Competition, appearing in the Fall 2010 edition.
It is a poem about family and memory, inspired by a conversation I had with the poet Robert Sward.
The Ukulele
I was talking about family with Robert over lunch,
how I had traveled to Oklahoma to be the minister
at Aunt Opal’s funeral, sing old hymns
like my family did in the Church of the Nazarene—
the six of us next to the pulpit while mom played
the ukulele, which she learned in Hawaii as a young teacher.
Robert, with his eye for keeping family alive in verse
said you should put that in a poem, the ukulele,
you know, how odd in a church, and this was the way
of my family, always a little odd but with a kind of music.
Four strings of siblings, my father the wood, my mother
the one strumming us into sound. I remember
swaying on the raised platform adjacent the pulpit,
my mother plucking the ukulele while we sang
they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings as eagles which,
with a ukulele sounded almost heretical.
But this was our beauty: a string, a person, a chord,
a family twining the exotic, the novel,
into new tradition. Years later, making Opal
a family video, we gathered in the Japanese hexagon
my father built, singing the old hymn again
with mom’s ukulele, but humorously,
dancing Mexican puppets punctuating
the air with raised fists as we sang,
our lives resonant with quirky joy.
This is what I was thinking,
looking at Robert over tea, the way family
endures, quivering as a plucked string—
the ukulele almost tangible, humming
in the air between us.