Front Porch Review
A literary magazine for the young at heart and mind

Halfway into the green you can hear them
The drums repeating themselves
Completing one sentence and starting another
The drummers a circle silhouetted in shade
Crouching while holding the drums with their legs
Or standing or sitting cross-legged
Creating a murmur that speaks without words
They compete with the people around them
Who reach out to each other
In ways without words
Bare-chested young men kick a ball with their heels
One shirtless person is wearing a python
Someone is dancing alone in the circle
Others are following dogs on their leashes
Leaning on bicycles, strolling with babes
In the heat, replete with the rumble of drums
Repeating themselves
Connecting the dogs and the bikes and the people
To the park and the sky and the sun in our eyes
Getting high on their own adlibbing
Now rolling, now slowing their beat to a hum
Until dark makes the green fade to grey
The atmosphere stills
And we scatter to each our own way.

By Patricia Bass

Patricia Bass is a retired graphic designer whose avocation is writing. Her poems and prose have appeared in Wright College's The Wright Side and in Osher Lifelong Learning Institute's The Journal. She grew up in a small Utah town and studied art in Salt Lake City while working at a drugstore soda fountain. To pay for further art courses, she worked for three years in a cafeteria at a civilian-military post in the Utah desert. In 1955 she moved to Chicago where she combined marriage and family with art studies and a twenty-five-year design career. After retiring she took a few writing courses, liked what she was doing and continued for a degree in English with a minor in writing. Pat lives in Chicago and is currently readying her first book of poems for publication.