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Kyle Pratt from Kinney Heights, Climbing New Heights

Roy Readmond

Details: Category: Featured Teen; Published on Friday, 19 October 2018 22:10; Written by D.V. Lawrence

While grandparents despair that the younger generation has been captured by twitter, instagram, gameboys, selfies, cell phones, celebrity and various other electronic distractions - or that the art of reading a book or writing a poem has been sacrificed to these false gods - they need despair no more. Roy Readmond, a 16 year old Los Angeles native, resident of Kinney Heights and student at Larchmont Charter School is a member ofLarchmont’s “Get Lit” poetry team. These school teams engage in fierce poetry competition throughout the city and Roy's team made it all the way to the Los Angeles City Finals this Spring. “Get Lit” is the largest student poetry organization in the country and Roy's poem wowed everyone.

To Grandpa, Who Had Alzheimer's,
and Lost Himself In His Leather Chair.

When you had your last stroke,

when, inescapably

you fell away

from understanding--

Your entire world

reduced to four rooms--

When the final clouds

over the valley of your mind

let go of their last rain,

the ridges of your brain

physically unraveled like your marriage.

In the last few months,

Your stomach never stopped commanding.

Did you still crave

Montana freshwater oysters,

and Cherry Garcia ice cream?

Your eyes inspected the room:

Was it because, when you dropped your plates,

their shattering reminded you

of the firing of a gun--

your soul explosively

Amputated from your body,

a lost hunter

in an overgrown forest of neurosis,

Listening for the sound of a great white stag.

Were you listening for your spirit?

Or was your soul,

Still Inside you?

A bird entangled in the Celtic knot of

Sulci and gyri brain ridges,

a dying grey snake,

Sitting in its own living room,

Losing itself in its leather chair.

I remember in the last few days,

you thought you were a wild horse--

the family, that you had carried for so long,

could not force you to drink water.

You converted your parched body

into a desert as if to prepare yourself

for your final crossing-- sacrifice for migration over--

like the time you rode across

Death Valley with only Poncho,

your favorite mule,

The night that you died,

you came to my father and uncle together

Whom you could no longer love or remember,

In the winter of a dream.

You were a horned owl perched

in the hollow of a cottonwood tree

Before flying out

in a snowstorm

Gone-forever-saying:

“It is time.”

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