12/07/2023
Love this latest poem written for me by my father Gerald Sloan. It is a funny coincidence that I have spent so many hours lost in the weeds trying to eradicate the invasives and restore the natives after being brought into the world by a Dr. W**d!
Shady Grove Wildflower Farm
(Allison Sloan, Proprietor)
My daughter was born in a pink stucco
hospital demolished decades ago.
Our one-horse town had only
two doctors. When my daughter
came, one doctor had gone home
for supper, the other to a bass
fishing tournament. So she was
delivered by a German veterinarian
whose license to practice on humans
was not good enough for Arkansas.
Thank God she answered the phone.
I guess it’s why I believe in omens.
Doctor No. 1 choked on a fish bone.
Doctor No. 2’s boat sank. Olga W**d,
the attending midwife, obviously marked
my firstborn who now owns a suburban
plant farm and refuses to use herbicides,
another reminder of the often strange
wendings and windings known as destiny,
of how things are as they were meant to be.
Gerry Sloan is a retired music professor living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. His collections are Paper Lanterns (2011), Crossings: A Memoir in Verse (2017), plus the recent “chapthology” Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry (2022). Recent work appears in Arkansas Review, Cold Mountain Review, Mid/South Sonnets, The Midwest Quarterly, Cave Region Review (featured poet), and Elder Mountain (featured poet). Plus he has six chapbooks, most recently Fractals (2021), a collection of micro-poems.
