By Bill Castanier on April 21, 2015
folktale
the enigma of the broken watch:
every time she came into a new town
she’d bring it to the jewelers one by one
each would open the back
and point out the broken parts
one by one and tell her
not me maybe someone else
some other shop
one jeweler kept it for two months
offering hope and increasingly rising estimates
but in the end it came back broken
the men who repair watches
who are sent watches by shops
came to know her by her watch
they would send it back with regrets
in time all the jewelers & the repairmen
were beset by nightmares of a wandering woman
holding out a broken watch
they’d see her on a dusty road in the moonlight
strolling from town to town shop to shop
she’d hold out the round gold shell
on the palm of her bare hand
hold it out toward them and
in their dreams they’d
shake their heads no
shake their heads
no
Janet Homer
Janet Homer is from Flint, Michigan. She has an MFA from the University of Montana, won a Hopwood Award for Poetry from the University of Michigan, and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
I wrote this when I lived in Wyoming and had a gold pocket watch I desperately wanted to have fixed. The image of the wandering woman comes from Latin American folklore–La Llorona.
Posted in Literary Lansing, News, Poem/a/Day | Tagged Janet Homer, Lansingonlinews.com, poem a day |
Bill Castanier has been an award-wining weekly newspaper editor, advertising and public relations executive in his 40 year career. In addition, he has been an executive with a newspaper trade association and founded Michigan’s first technology association, I-TE@M. He writes a weekly newspaper feature on Michigan authors and is on the Board of the Kerrytown BookFest and the Michigan Notable Book Awards. He has the only daily blog on Michigan literature (
Mittenlit) and founded
Spartanpodcast.com.