‘Voices in the Air’ & ‘Home Before Dark’
Nick Hewitt is a writer and photographer from Eugene, Oregon, whose work explores liminal spaces, urban solitude, and the surreal beauty hiding in ordinary scenes. He is currently working on a novel about grief, memory, and myth. Instagram: @yerboihuey
Voices in the Air
The voice assails me immediately
as I exit the building—at first just sound,
but then words emerge, vaguely,
a scratchy but insistent voice
hailing the crowd pushing across the street.
I look past the walkway, down the slope
of an expansive lawn, but I cannot make out
the source—a man’s voice to be sure, but ragged
with electric amplifying, some kind
of megaphone to project the message.
I can make out only a phrase or two,
“Yes, people, that’s what the Bible says,”
echoing, repeating comes the phrase again,
“what the Bible says,” but the specifics
lose themselves in noise of crowd and traffic.
Then the voice itself is overwhelmed
by the roar and rumble of the generator
run by construction workers repairing the road.
They are digging deep holes, covered
then uncovered with steel-hard metal plates.
The megaphone preaching echoes in my mind
with another, even more artificial voice
that comes once each month with the test
of the shrill emergency alert sirens—
to me they sound like air raid warnings
recalled from my Cold War youth—
followed by that mechanical voice, male again,
crisply, awkwardly chopping off words
syllable by syllable, “This si-ren is a test,
on-ly a test; there is no need for ac-tion.”
Voices in the air, warning of threats,
of fated doom, from tornado, or bomb,
or from biblical prophecies carried
on the electrically projected air
of that hand-held speaker of some one
crying out in the urban-ness for all
to repent. It brings back another sound
from my childhood—the old ragged
street preacher at the corner of Ontario
and Public Square, who sang and danced
his gospel more than shouting it,
like a one-man religious circus in swift shoes,
there between Union Terminal and the
shopping district, facing off against waves
of those seeking gratification more than grace.
Dedicated, never seemed to miss a day,
out by where I’d pass to reach the bus stop.
He’d stare into my eyes, bending toward me,
and declare more than ask, “You, yes you,
what have you done for Jesus, today?”
So be it, the chorus of city sounds back then,
or here and now, drown out human voices,
animated or amplified as they may be,
while those construction workers still labor
to dig deep beneath the corpus of the street.
They may know secrets street preachers can
only imagine—that one in his stark white helmet
and bright yellow-orange vest, peering down,
he is Virgil reincarnate, awaiting a Dante
still lost and in need of trip through hell.
Home Before Dark
The Memory of Beverly Potts*
She was the story we all were told,
becoming a cautionary tale
against her will and against hope,
not proved dead but surely not among the quick.
Summer, 1951, in the shadow of new bombs,
during wars endlessly cold but hot in Korea,
our Cleveland headlines cried out the loss
of the little girl who’d gone to the festival
at Halloran Park, just a short walk, gone
with friends, then staying behind, then just Gone.
“Where are you going now?” parents asked,
trying to subdue anxiety in tightened throats,
followed by “stay together with your friends,”
finally, “and be home before dark.”
Yes, home before the light faded in the west,
before darkness settled over post-war bungalows,
with shadows that hid menace unknown.
Weeks, months, even years of searching,
of investigating led in sinuous paths
like the track of a venomous snake in tall grass,
but no solutions, no resolutions, till family tragedy
and probable crime evolved to public myth—
no one spoke of pedophiles then, only “strangers”
or “bad men,” as if bandits from B-western movies,
but the physical threats seemed real, angry
to young bodies not let emergent to their sex.
All was shadowed, meaning left implied,
with just the shrill warnings growing louder
for all the secrets darkly held behind.
“Home before dark” was the call, the cry,
as tennis-shoed feet bounced out the back door
and slapped against cement squares to the gate,
to the easement, to the path between the trees
that could still conceal even in remaining light.
The world around us grew more explosive
with each mushrooming Southwest or Pacific “test,”
and we read of wars and spoke rumors of wars
from the newsprint realities spread
across breakfast and dinner tables, uncertain
of a future but aware of sales on the next page.
But war was far away, on a cold hill
or in a damp, dripping jungle, more like movies
than like home—but the park, the walkways,
the tree-lined streets shadowing streetlight
safety but still holding spaces to hide—
that was the danger alive and throbbing in the dark.
We grew, ignoring the warnings, surviving
by chance, by the numbers, or succumbing
to less mysterious threats—hit by the car,
drowned in the lake at the local beach,
deaths that still evoked anguish and grief,
but at least with concrete evidence.
Life goes on, loss continues when not found,
as what or who disappears becomes indelible
in the mind and heart, etched in memory—
the smiling girl in the photograph, on a swing,
disappeared, and never home before dark.
_____________________________
Beverly [Potts] disappeared from a neighborhood festival at Halloran Park. Her hair was in a short bob with bangs. She was last wearing blue jeans with a side zipper, green socks, white undershirt, red shirt, a navy blue jacket and Karrybrooke loafers. She was also wearing a yellow gold ring. She has a vaccination scar on her upper left arm, a scar over her left eyebrow and a kidney shaped birthmark on her instep. Ohio Attorney General’s Office website.
Vincent Casaregola teaches American literature and film, creative writing, and rhetorical studies at Saint Louis University. He has published poetry in a number of journals, as well as creative nonfiction, short fiction, and flash fiction. His poetry collection, Vital Signs (dealing with illness, loss, trauma, and grieving), is now available from Finishing Line Press.
