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

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That guy Parkerson is funny. How can I contact him. I want to
try to him to come out here and straighten out a few things going
wrong in my university.

Martin Hughes
Chancellor, San Jose State

On 8/29/05, Hardy Parkerson, Atty. wrote:
>
> 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