Lucinda Matlock by Edgar Lee Masters

Poem 23 (Pandemic Day 37)

Lucinda Matlock 

I went to the dances at Chandlerville,

And played snap-out at Winchester.

One time we changed partners,

Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,

And then I found Davis.

We were married and lived together for seventy years

Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,

Eight of whom we lost

Ere I had reached the age of sixty.

I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick

I made the garden, and for holiday

Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,

And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,

And many a flower and medicinal weed--

Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys,

At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all, 

And passed to sweet repose.

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

Degenerate sons and daughters,

Life is too strong for you--

It takes life to love Life.

Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, Collier Books, 1962.

I remember being introduced to Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology in high school English and about the same time the play, Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, was performed by the senior class.  

All of a sudden, the voices of the dead were everywhere and they had stories to tell the living.  The Diary of Anne Frank was probably still on my bookshelf and still holding sway in my mind.  The Vietnam War was raging and I would get letters from a neighbor, who had been my first crush (I was 8 and he was 11).  For an adolescent at anytime the world can be strange and uncertain; for my generation which had experienced the assassination of President Kennedy (I was in Mr. Peterson's 4th period Social Studies class) and would soon be in the shadow of Martin Luther King's and Bobby Kennedy's assassinations; the world was in upheaval.

Still, just like Lucinda Matlock (a stand-in for his grandmother, his ideal of the undaunted pioneer woman) we went to dances, we fell in love, we persevered.  At least the lucky ones among us.  Now after all these years my classmates, my fellow travelers from the 50's, may be speaking from the graveyard of their sins and their sorrows, their triumphs and their pain.  Our voices have been added or soon will be to the laments of Spoon River.  But until then--live life; love Life!