Madison Street: 25 Sonnets

My childhood home on Madison Street

 

 

 

From 1956 to 1972 I lived on Madison Street, Wilkes-Barre, PA, in the 100-block between Beaumont and Butler Streets. "Madison Street" - a series of twenty-five sonnets,  - recounts some of my earliest memories of growing up in that neighborhood. The series appears in its entirety in my book Pointing Home (Kelsay Books, 2019).

I will be posting various sonnets from "Madison Street" on my blog, The Wonderful Boat (www.cathychandler.blogspot.com) in the coming weeks. It may not be regular, since I'll be traveling to my home in Punta del Este, Uruguay next week.

"Overture" is the first of the twenty-five sonnets.

Madison Street

 

Overture

 

Imagine this: a narrow one-way street

in northeast Pennsylvania long ago,

between two Asian wars, a neighborhood—

a little world of sweet and bittersweet,

where children didn’t know they didn’t know,

and things were either bad or they were good.

We didn’t get the gist of dirty jokes;

we actually believed the monkey hoax.

So, here’s to us who didn’t know the score,

who idolized Hank Aaron and Annette;

who pilfered Slo-Pokes from the corner store

or from an aunt, a Newport cigarette;

whose plain speech never lapsed to metaphor,

and party lines comprised our Internet.