Ph: Oklahoma: Twenty Acres More Or Less Poem by Brian Johnston

I was only twelve or thirteen when Dad bought
The twenty acres alongside the highway
On the east side of town in 1956,
That seemed so quiet then, unimportant even.

A piece of ground where horses had been kept for years,
Though I’d never noticed them there.
Rough wooden corral and shed with water tank and working
Wind mill, was the stuff of dreams for my sister,
Three years younger: a horse of her own,
And not just that, if she thought that far
But a safe place to ride it as well,
It seemed almost too perfect,
And it indeed turned out to be, too perfect.

Other dreams too were sacrificed just to purchase this land,
The twenty thousand dollar bank note required to buy it
More than enough to make a payment on a house
For my mother
Who had spent thirteen years in a house in a poor part
Of town, the poorest schools for her kids as well,
Eager to share her husband’s success.
It would be eight more long years before her new home was built.

But war broke out the day of the purchase almost,
If there had in fact been truce beforehand.
Tears set new rainfall records
On the plains of Northwestern Oklahoma,
An eclipse of the heart darkened the landscape,
Earthquakes, crop failures and more,
The dust bowl hardships almost forgotten,
Apocalypse now.

If the dust bowl drove Okies to California,
Her husband’s rigidity drove my mother,
A proud woman, an artist as well,
To paint beyond the edge of her canvas
In a search of new ways to express herself,
Only her love for her children,
Saved the family.

But at what a cost did the two of them survive
These days of volcanic ash everywhere,
Love stunted and malformed
By misunderstanding’s toxic debris,
Their inability to share in such
Major decisions,
Both entangled in a web of gender defined roles.

My father caught too in his prejudice against
Money spent purely for pleasure,
The working dollhouse miniature sewing machine
That he refused to let my sister purchase
And then took away from her
When she bought it surreptitiously.
Her horse,
Turned down for perhaps similar reasons,
‘Joy’ a misuse of funds that might be
Invested to a better end.
Well that, and his valuable time wasted supporting
The dreams of a child,
Even the dreams of his artistic wife.

When finally the new house was built on the 20 acres
I was already in college,
Never lived there
Though I chose the wallpaper for “my room, ”
My dreams now were only of leaving, living on my own.
I studied Physics, and married a city girl
Which guaranteed separation from
My father,
He saw the hand writing on the wall,
And never allowed himself to like her,
Though they were similar in many ways,
A grudging acknowledgement of him on my part.

A piece of land,20 acres more or less, a ship
That my family sailed into the future
And now,
Our parents both deceased, that land has helped
Secure both my sister’s and my futures,
Our father’s dream, taking precedence over ours,
Provision for his family and their families,
Land now worth millions,
An ark for floods that never came,
But might have, and truthfully still might come,
A warrior’s sacrifice, his dream.