Page 6 - January 2021

WESTERN
jack foley RAMBLINGS

OCTOGENARIAN ANTICS

Child of the West

This is the first of my monthly
appearances in this magazine--many
thanks to Shajil Anthru!--and this is
the first poem I wrote upon reaching
Berkeley, California in 1963:

Yes yes it is
The West

I had been born in the East, in
Neptune, New Jersey, in 1940. My
father, in his forties, worked at Fort
Monmouth Army Installation as a
telegrapher during the war. My mother
took care of the house. Not long after
my birth, the family relocated to
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and then,
while I was still very young, to a town--
technically a village--in New York
State, Port Chester. It was there that I
grew up and from there that I went, on
scholarship, to Cornell University, an
East Coast Ivy League school.

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litterateur january 2021