Andrew Oerke

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The Original Lettermaker

 

Then she dipped into the surly waters
and hauled out wigglies by their toothpick legs.
Collectively, they were baptized as the Alphabet
and they scampered faster than thought itself.
They scuttled around like crabs in the sand
and they zoomed out farther than telescope lenses could
though their footprints always left the same stamp
but in so many different combinations.
Thoughts trailed after them like tails on kites,
like tin cans clattering to gain on a puppy dog’s tail.

She made land with her squirmy boatload
and disembarked at Byblos like a fainting Phoenix
with the back of her hand to her forehead
Tallulah-Bankhead style, and then died but rose
again from the twenty-six egg casings she laid
while dreaming she was founding libraries
that gave birth to a lot more libraries
whose geometrics progressed amongst us
beyond the scratch pad of basic arithmetic.

But the First Lettermaker herself had died.
Twenty-six offspring had worn her out
like a queen bee without a back-up queen.
She wasn’t a Phoenix but her skimpy kids were.
Her fingers curled up like spiders in the frost
of old age.  So the Mother of Language croaked
in the sense in which she was no longer alive.
Then talk hardened in classrooms square as ice cubes
though the letters were ditto-generating.
The classrooms cross-examined the poems
to death or sentenced them to life in the pen,
depending on who’s got the key to the chastity belt
on the treasure chest containing the true-gen codes
that started it all with twenty-six bubbles of sound
whose babbling brooks are now the swell we swim in
as the fish who gill up on full fathoms of word-waves.
“Words words words,” Hamlet muttered, and then some.
Polonius allowed as how that was all quite true
but it didn’t really answer his question
though it did continue the conversation
which is all we can hope for in the best of times.

 

Bio

In feature articles The New York Times and International Herald Tribune have said that here is a poet “whose muse is a world traveler.”  Andrew Oerke has lived many lives.  After suggesting the idea of the Peace Corps to Jerry Clark, Kennedy’s campaign manager in Wisconsin, he went on to become a Peace Corps Director in Africa and the Caribbean, and for many years president of a private and voluntary organization working in developing countries. Oerke worked and visited in more than 160 countries, is a Golden Gloves champ, football player, university professor and Poet-in-Residence, dean of administration at one of the largest community colleges, U.S. Korean War veteran, World Bank consultant, and consultant to the United Nations on the Gulf War, on financial services, and on the environment.  Mr. Oerke was also the first Director of the International Folk Festival on the Mall for the Smithsonian, and as Dean of Administration for the Medical Center of Miami-Dade Community College started one of the country’s first Wellness Institutes. He has also pioneered microfinance in more than 60 disadvantaged countries.  Mr. Oerke has studied at many universities in the US and abroad, and was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and scholarships at the University of Iowa writers’ workshop, where he studied under Mark Strand, and at Baylor University where he studied Wellerisms with Charles G. Smith.  Andrew Oerke’s work has appeared frequently in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Mademoiselle, and in many other publications in the U.S., England, France, Germany, Lebanon, Malawi, Kenya, the Philippines, Jamaica, and Mexico.  He has published five books of poetry.  In 2003, he was given the award for literature by the UN Society of Writers and Artists.  He is now living in the U.S., and has returned full time to writing poetry, his first love.