Antique Roads; Modern Cars : a Poem
Great Scott, How Humiliating!
Street is crowned,
to aid good drainage;
Car parked
lists
hard right...
Passenger-laden
it settles comfortably
on its suspension.
Last in, I reach
from the front seat
to pull shut the door.
Following the leaning road,
the door has wedged
against the sidewalk...
Harder I tug:
the door
budges not.
Myself, regally seated
upon the public way:
feet repose
inside the car.
Backstory
Sometime in the mid-1960's when I was in high school, the family traveled 'back east,' to Massachusetts to visit my mother's side of the family. Given that I was a teenager, subject to the terrible angst of embarrassments that today I'd find funny, it took me until over 20 years later to compose this poem about the incident.
Originally written in November of 1988, with a revision in June of 2010.
© 2010 Liz Elias