Re: J.F.K.'S FAVORITE POEM

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Being a hillbilly from the Ozarks, it is understandable that
you would not appreciate this great work of art and
literature. Perhaps if the poet had talked about lying in a
rocky creek or playing a fiddle while sitting outside a log
dirt-topped hut on the side of a hill you would have related
to it better. In Louisiana we call them red-necks, and in the
Ozarks I suppose they are called hillbillies.

H.P.

On 8/29/05, Ozarks Lawyer - The Anti-Poet. wrote:
>
>
> Does anyone really read this crap and become moved by it?
> Come to know your whistle? Flick the mushrooms? Ah, come
> on.
>
>
>
>
> On 8/29/05, Hardy Parkerson, Atty. wrote:
>> Young man, I have seen thee strolling
>> In the stillness of the park.
>> Day by day, hand in pocket
>> Of your thin, familiar jacket,
>> Twlight into dark.
>> I have come to know your whistle,
>> Know your collie,
>> Know your cap.
>> Have seen the straggling sunlight hold you,
>> Watched the emerald grass enfold you
>> In its loving lap.
>> With your lichened switch I see you
>> Flick the mushrooms in your way.
>> And I know what you are thinking.
>> Would that through the soft mist falling
>> You could hear a stranger calling,
>> Stay!
>>
>>
>> Anybody know who wrote this poem which is said to have
>> been J.F.K.'s favorite? One interpretation of it is of a
>> young man who strolls in something like Central Park (NYC)
>> each afternoon late and is watched from the window of a
>> high-rise apartment or hosptial nearby by an invalid
>> and/or homebound disabled person (surely a female), who
>> looks forward each day to the young man's arrival and
>> watches his every move, and that of his collie, and who is
>> close enough to hear his whistle, or can see that he is
>> whistling and "hears" it in her own mind, and who dreds
>> the time when the younng man walks away from the park just
>> before sun down. That evaluation of the poem was more or
>> less written in some other words by my late, great father
>> J.D. Parkerson, born Rocky Mount, LA, 1911, a poet
>> himself, among other things. I wonder if my father wrote
>> that poem. If so, he never told me he did. However, I
>> found it among his possessions after he died, as well as
>> his intrepretation of it, and the memorandum to which his
>> hand-written interpretation was attached said that this
>> was J.F.K.'s favorite poem. But I wonder who did write
>> it. Does anybody know?
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> Hardy Parkerson, Atty.
>> Lake Charles, LA