Badge No. 160 and other poems
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
HOLDING MY FATHER
They phone
from the hospital.
“Your father
is being released--
there is nothing more
we can do.”
We know,
we are leaving the hospital
for the last time.
We drive home
in silence
with private
memories experienced
over a lifetime.
I park the car,
open the door and
gently lift him out.
Carrying my father
into the house,
I remember
an old childhood photograph
of my father carrying me.
He looks up at me.
I tell him
we are finally home.
AFTER WORK
Each week workers
from the mine
and factories
cashed their paychecks
at the local taverns.
They drank at the Dutch Hill Inn,
Oxford House, Lackawanna Inn,
and Bosco’s Tavern.
Shots of whiskey
and glasses of beer
before heading home
to their waiting families,
or not heading home.
Mothers often sent their children
to the taverns,
looking for their fathers,
wanting them home.
Some men brought
their money home
others squandered
their wages at the bar
too drunk to hear
the cries of their families.
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Book Details
About the Book
With Furnace Brook Collected Poems and now Badge No.160 and other poems, - Frederick Pheiffer has heeded the muse's classic advice: "Look into your heart and write." What he has found there are vibrant recollections of real persons and actual places, which he customarily suffices in a mellow light, although he occasionally applies a gently ironic touch.
However much Frederick Pheiffer subjects may be down-to-earth, his lyric passages seem to shine, not above them, but through them. With an acute eye, tempered by a kindly empathy, he conducts his audience on a poet's pilgrimage through the vignettes of a life well-remembered and well-recorded.
Individually, each poem offers an invitation to meditation. Taken together, they sustain a rarely encountered tone that remains at once elegiac and hopeful, as well as celebratory and thankful.
Frederick Pheiffer's poems are a sign of the quotidian reality of his personal experience. "Between the sign and the reality, there is an interpenetration that we might call the sacramentality of everyday life. " He has the eye, the ear, and the voice to capture the uncommon in the commonplace with his poems.
So many of Pheiffer's poems come right at the reader. Using a baseball analogy, his typical poem is like a sneaky fastball that gains momentum as it darts across the plate. In the poem, " Adventure Unlimited," the phrase "boats pushed up onto the shore" evokes my times with my father when we would take a Camp at Cooperstown for fishing and boating on Otsego Lake. The mellow recollection then turns to cosmic wonder with " the evening sky fills with confetti stars from giant sparklers held in angels hands." From mellow recollection to cosmic wonder represents an absorbing transition.
In fine, Frederick Pheiffer's BADGE NO. 160 and other poems resounds the phrase, "Cor Ad Cor Loquitur": " Heart speaks to heart."
Edward J. McBride, Professor Emeritus St. Mary's University
About the Author
This is the second book of poems by Frederick Pheiffer. His first book, Furnace Brook Collected Poems, dealt with many memories of his childhood in Oxford, New Jersey. Badge No.160 and other poems continues the theme of growing up in 1950' s rural America. Interspersed are poems of love, devotion, loss, and spiritual awakening.
Frederick Pheiffer is retired from government service and writes full-time. He and his wife live in rural upstate New York and devote their energies to rescuing and caring for discarded animals.