Ode to Middleport

 NOTE: The author wrote this poem 44 years ago

after visiting his hometown on the Ohio River.

The town was recently featured on these pages in a recall

of the author’s closeted collection of American newspapers.

Five decades after this free verse was penned, the author now

knows how daunting it is to find those “same Sunday funny papers”.

Second and Mill Streets, Middleport Ohio

Ode to Middleport

by Jamie Jobb

They sit out on front porchswings
and wait for you to come back
from your meanderful wanderings
to your hometown
by the river, muddy river
Ohio … 
where they remember everything about you ---
or at least something …
“Who was your Mother?
A Fleming … No wonder 
you’re so friendly!”

It makes you feel friendly first
and saddened next as lost friends and relations
see you slip away to other ports 
on down the river,
up in the air or out to sea, 
all of which
aren’t Back Home where … 
They sit in their stores and wait
for you to come home again.

And they remember Everything:
your brothers, your sisters, your mom, your pop,
and they remember you while you fly off the
handle to Boston or Birmingham or Buffalo
or someplace else that starts 
with another letter besides B.

The world if full of places to go.
Pick a letter! Any letter!
But your small town stays
home.
All the time.

And you don’t even have to write 
a letter to know
it doesn’t die and 
it’s full of people
who sometimes paint their houses
and never tear down the post office
just to replace it with a new one
and all the same reading
the
same funny papers on the 
same Sundays.
Just like they always did.

Yes, the old town sits
and waits for you
on its front porch,
waits for you to come home.

Home is a long way from here, but 
somehow home is always within me
on my front porch
in my heart
in my hometown,

Middleport, Ohio

– July, 1977