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Column 265

78 RPM

Intro by Ted Kooser
04.18.2010

Tell a whiny child that she sounds like a bro­ken record, and she’s like­ly to say, What’s a record?” Jeff Daniel Mar­i­on, a Ten­nessee poet, tells us not only what 78 rpm records were, but what they meant to the peo­ple who played them, and to those who remem­ber the peo­ple who played them.

78 RPM

In the back of the junkhouse
stacked on a cardtable covered
by a ragged bedspread, they rest,
black platters whose music once
crackled, hissed with a static
like shuffling feet, fox trot or two-step,
the slow dance of the needle
riding its merry-go-round,
my mother’s head nestled
on my father’s shoulder as they  
turned, lost in the sway of sounds,
summer nights and faraway
places, the syncopation of time
waltzing them to a world
they never dreamed, dance
of then to the dust of now.

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We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Jeff Daniel Marion. Reprinted from his most recent book of poems, Father, Wind Publications, 2009, by permission of Jeff Daniel Marion and the publisher.  

Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.