Fast Day 218 August 5 2011 {In the Ball-Park of the Madding Crowd}

In the Ball-Park of the Madding Crowd

In Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Yellow Room,
Shiva woke up after taking a snooze;
so there was a young girl dead, just one,
and Floyd the sheriff drove to the cottage
old man Spencer had bought in thirty-eight
before the war, before his own death.

Mrs. Spencer closed her eyes, exhausted;
her daughter, Carol, who’d lost her lover
in the war, resented digitalis,
mother’s med,
mother peevish, invalidish...
lost her lover in the war,

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Age Atomica
was about a full month away; it was
June of the year Nineteen Forty-Five;
In July Trinity fathered Fat Man and Little Boy
and Shiva was the Destroyer of Worlds!
and Shiva was in the house, the big house!

Mrs. Spencer sipped her scotch and soda
and dreamed of her son, Greg, coming home on
a thirty day to be decorated
by FDR himself,
the President…
and a dead girl in the Yellow Room.

Now in August of Twenty-Eleven
the Dow will drop five hundred points;
now Shiva works for Standard & Poor’s!
Can’t CSI all the dead in all our
yellow rooms: Iwo Jima and Darfur;
in the ball-park of the madding crowd.

Mrs. Spencer sat in a white wicker chair
in the sun porch…
after this great war, things will
never, ever be the same;
the future will be bright:
the future when every TV
talking head will know
who killed whom...
the young lady
named Casey perhaps
in the Yellow Room.

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Reading a murder mystery, The Yellow Room, by Mary Roberts Rinehart in an edition published in 1945.
Thinking how things are in the past and the present.

Casey  - Casey Anthony

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