Web photo courtesy of animals.net
In the 1980s, I wrote a series of memory poems about growing up in the semi-rural town of Dracut, Mass., a suburb of the city of Lowell, about 30 miles northwest of Boston. In the late 1950s through the 1960s my life was centered in this community settled by English immigrants in the mid-1600s. The woodlands had been home to the Pennacook people of the Wabanaki Confederacy for thousands of years. For three hundred years after the English came, the town remained predominantly a farming community with a couple of small textile mill clusters on fast-moving Beaver Brook, which empties into the Merrimack River in the Rosemont section of Lowell bordering Dracut. The land on the north bank of the Merrimack was all Dracut until portions were annexed by Lowell in the late 1800s.
After World War II, many young veterans from the city moved their new families over the city line into Dracut where small houses were being built at a rapid pace. The low-cost mortgage benefit in the G.I. (Government Issue, a shorthand for military members) Bill passed by Congress to help returning service members allowed for this widespread migration around the country. For my parents, it was a chance to buy their own home, a small ranch house with a yard in the Winter Hill area of Dracut that old maps label as New Boston Village, a sub-neighborhood of a larger section called Navy Yard. And why Navy Yard? There are two origin stories: (1) there had been a company making parts for ships that were sent down the Merrimack to Newburyport for its shipbuilding industry; (2) a textile mill for a time made cloth or perhaps uniforms for the U.S. Navy.
But I’m getting away from the background for this poem, which is the setting of forest and farm fields where I grew up. My friends and I spent a lot of time on our own in the woods, exploring, hiking, collecting pine cones and sometimes bothering the wild animals. Here’s a story from a long-ago Halloween. When I brought this poem into my MFA writing workshop at the University of California in Irvine, some of my classmates acted as if I had grown up alongside Daniel Boone on the frontier.
HALLOWEEN MASK
Skunk cabbage blooms in the swamp. Sun dissolves
As kids pour wax into muskrat prints. Busy melting paraffin,
They let the dog bark, thinking it has a chipmunk.
“It’s a raccoon, a raccoon, a raccoon!”
“Don’t scare it, look out, they bite, stay back.”
“Go home for the BB gun and a cage, hurry! Hold the dog.”
“Where’s the gun? Come here. Use a rock. Hit it.”
“Hurry up, chase it, run, it’s getting away!”
A boy whips a hand ax and misses.
Pumpkins. Indian corn. Wafer moon over Winter Hill.
Early bird beggars cut across yards. For supper,
Mothers are making pots of macaroni, the kind like fire hoses.
Big kids fool around on the porches, planning the night.
They’ll travel in packs until the door locks click.
—Paul Marion (c) 2019