Today's poem is by Michael Goodfellow

Hungry
        "Years ago things seemed to be different from now. You would see and hear things."
        —account from Helen Creighton's Folklore of Lunenburg County, 1950

Cabbage Night that year was bright and humid.
No one around here knows that anymore,

before Hallowe'en, when tricks were played.
We prayed to God it wouldn't get too bad.

Ashley Conrad owned a general store,
the kind that sold can goods, tobacco, salt,

scotch whiskey, snowshoes, handwoven nets
and things the neighbours made—trade a rake

for a bristle broom, apples for a hooked rug.
The Depression was in another country.

No one along the river went hungry
or lacked a thing they needed. All of it

went together, you knew that—Cabbage Night,
making things by hand, the old ways, and if

it went together, it went out in a flash,
like a television set turned on. Bang—

the bulb must have blown on this thing,
you could put it that way, and there's the smoke

drifting over the decades. The smell soaks
into the curtains. The old ways are gone.

But not everything went out.
Some things—just a few have stuck around.

It's getting dark by six that time of year.
Supper is over, dishes put away,

and Ashley goes out back with the night's scraps,
where a wire's been tied taut at the back steps.

I'm alive, he says, but he hit his head.
His wife is stocking shelves the next day

when she hears the bang at the front counter.
That was the end of Cabbage Night on the river.

The new couple that ran it didn't last,
they'd notice a few things missing—stolen,

no, but pushed off the shelf. A tin of oats
or a bag of sugar. Hungry, I guess,

for the things he liked. You'd be out of sight
when it happened, but hear it hit the floor,

or was the thud something like the sound
when he fell at the counter, only quieter.

After I moved in, come cold weather,
didn't the fire alarm start each midnight.

Turn the friggin' thing off, she tells me.
There never was anything to turn off.

There's no batteries, no power going
to the thing. It's going off on its own,

screaming into the night about the life
the old fellow left behind—the life

we all left behind years ago.
There, do you hear it now, just faintly

beeping in one of the upstairs rooms.
Come tonight it'll be going full-bore.

No sir, some things have stuck around.
It hasn't been a general store for years.

People watched television, didn't sell
so many snowshoes no more. For now

I mean to use it as a house—I like
the big window in front to stare down

the river and watch the ferry.
I don't mind the odd thing flying around.

It doesn't get far, then it's not so real
if you can say something about it.

Then it seems made up. I can almost imagine
that later tonight I won't hear it.

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Copyright © 2022 Michael Goodfellow All rights reserved
from Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography
Gaspereau Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission