a poetry reading featuring four residents at berks leisure living in the rolling hills of bern township.

this week involved the heart-savvy joy of hosting a poetry reading with four different seniors who are in my second book in this project. they are brenda lee boone, harold weller, shirley hertzog, and arlene weaver. their names are all their own poetry, to boot. the reading happened at berks leisure living in bern township. many thanks to deb bossler for assisting with photography for the afternoon, too.

(harold weller)

(the infamous and laugh-ready brenda lee boone)

  

(shirley hertzog)

(arlene weaver)

i handed out copies of harold weller's poem in large font for everyone to read and take home with them as a reminder of this visit. below is a long excerpt from the poem. he was born in 1933.

*

i picked and inspected traditional varieties of shiny-skinned 

apples at ontelaunee orchards once they hired me after i 

turned 16, working there for 46 years, in the times when they 

had a need for me. when they didn’t, billy kline helped me 

to find something else to make sure i could keep bringing 

in money. sam merkel asked billy, do you know anyone who 

wants a job ? sam soon became my new boss at prestolite 

battery company across from schell’s restaurant, which 

opened in 1952—sometimes, i strolled across the street to eat 

my lunch there. after one guy used a forklift to move, elevate 

the shipments up higher into the air, we would load 1,000 

batteries on a train boxcar from the shipping and receiving 

room in the back of the building. it didn’t take that long. next, 

they met the rails behind the factory, to go wherever those 

orders were heading. we wore black rubber gloves. one 

battery still perched in the catalogs of my mind is a t88, 

a large kind for the engines of tractor trailers. we put them 

in boxes marked fragile. riding tractors don’t take really big 

batteries. motorcycles use smaller ones, too. the batteries 

were lowered into a big tank of acid to charge them. sam had 

a medical man come in to test us—he used to take blood out 

of your hand, set that garnet droplet on a glass microscope 

slide to see if you had battery acid poisoning. you gulped 

down a pint of milk in the morning, and then at dinner, you 

had to drink another bottle of it. i think that could tell them 

if i had battery acid in me. he’d punch the end of a needle into 

the tip of your finger. you had to let him do it to you, even if 

you didn’t like the pricking, the sight of blood—it was the law...