Big Bertha
Three boys tripoded in a park,
heads huddled to phones, and I
of course cast back to my vastly
better kid-dom
crouched down
and dirty on hands and knees
behind the school library with the
play-lunch bunch, tongues stapled
to lips, eyeballing a trenchlevel
dirtscape of mini Western Front,
lickin up a strategy to push through
the rough, make an advance on
that big shellhole of catseyes …
shoot straight,
take the mongrels by surprise …
Marbles, of course.
Might be warfare by other means,
just like shopping and children and
fast food, and in fact everything in
life
might be warfare by other means.
Including warfare.
… sorry, I’m not sure what that
means,
beyond being another pesky
Reductio ad Absurdum,
reducing my point to pointlessness …
… But we press
on
through a planetarium
of Aggies, Botchies, Catseyes,
Chinkies, Glassies, Toms, Taws,
Steelies …
Botchies were greenish glass balls,
ripped like roe from car batteries;
Steelies were ball-bearings, pepper
shook from dead engines and machines,
from buckshot size up to pinballs,
til
ballooned that crater chokin mutha
BIG BERTHA
(dum dum DAAAAA!)
Don’t know what crankcase
you was birthed from, beastie,
but it musta been
some monster machine
you big fat purring bearing you,
slow chundling mercurial moon,
lodestone magnetizing we who
worshiped you like the bomb
in Beneath the Planet of the Apes
supreme sister of heavy ordnance
gimletly fought for, back and forth
on some battle-ground scratched
from a roving front of wild terrain -
grass, sand, pie crust of playground
…
wherever we made a hole was a game.
I forget the rules exact …
we called the game ‘dibs’, I know
that,
and that you had to chip another dib
with your shooter, over distance,
into a hole of sometimes fiendish
design,
some concaved wide, others dug snug
into slopes with raked approach
suicidal as a Jap machine-gun post.
Nested within, the brilliant clutch
of eggs players staked, the pot we
shot for, first to chip in scooped
the lot
leaving the victor dripping a river
of glass globules from grubby mitts
into fatly clacking sack
… or something like that
And sometimes some fool staked Bertha
against a shrapnel scatter of
smallfry,
catseye trash, spoilies with part
glass
sheared off neat as a slice of fruit,
lopped like soldier eggs; or maybe
some big ole greasy Toms, been
through
the wars, milky as a mad crone’s eye,
pockmarked as Ray Barrett’s face
…
I forget the wager rate, but it
must have been big shakes against
that big steelie Bertha. She filled a
hole like a cannon ball a saucer, I
mean trying to chip her along, with
even a big Tom, was like trying to
shift a fat lady’s titty with a
teaspoon …
… maybe I stretch things a bit.
But no question Bertha was a big gal
with the precious heft to rip a hole
clean through that draw-string scrote
of your marble sack … oh, she
was
a cause to fight for, protect from attack ...
Where are you now Bertha,
where did you roll to rusted lie?
Where do any of us lie
as planets cannonade
shot into a black hole
to be scooped clinking
into a draw-string galaxy
by a victor god …
