Here are a couple of things I've written in the past 45 years...
Jack Reads His Speech (the story behind the work)
by Jack Peck
When Deborah asked me if I’d like to come here to your poetry night, I thought, why not? Being a trained extrovert, I thought I should bring something along to share with you. I didn’t think you’d mind if it was something I’d done a long time ago.
In 1963, when I was 18 and a senior in High School, I won the annual Norristown Times Herald Oratorical Contest. It was my second try. I was out for revenge.
I’d lost in my junior year, 1962, to a wonderful speaker of coloured persuasion, who had wowed’ em by describing how wonderful it was to be a Negro in America.
What got the judges, see, was that she put everything in terms of the staunchly conservative, middle-class white values, which underpinned her own, and their own, very safe world.
I didn’t like losing to that kind of hypocrisy. And, I needed to win.
So, the next year, I decided that I wanted to win the damn thing, not because of last year’s winner, though it did feel GOOD to beat her socks off, but mostly because my grades didn’t equal my ambitions. I wanted to go to New York University to study International Law, and I needed to be one active and successful little ass-kisser if I was going to have any chance at all of making it to, much less in, New York.
So, here’s what I figured.
I’d ignore the usual American Legion kind of flag-waving that had won it for so many others in years past, and had lost it for me the previous year, and I would take a big risk. I’d risk humiliation.
I would bare my heart. I would expose my inner self, by writing something so emotionally wet, in short, that I couldn’t possibly lose.
So I wrote a speech that couldn’t lose.
Something that frightened me even to think about it.
Here’s the skinny behind the caper.
I figured that all the judges would know how much raw courage it would take for me to get through THIS speech in school assembly, where the contest was held. In front of 800 of my acne-scarred boofhead teenaged angst-ridden, stuck-up, attitude-baby, companions on the road to disillusion.
Here’s just part of what I was up against.
Antony Narducci was a big man on campus, with the chicks, and with the local Italian community at the school, a state champion wrestler, and one of my best friends. His arms were bigger around than my waist.
(Wait for it.)
I know. I know. But, back then, I was six foot two and weighed less than 9 stone, about 52 kilos.
So, anyway, Antony. I went to Antony and explained to him what I was going to do, and why. I even let him read the speech. He thought I had balls. Especially after he read the speech.
I’m pleased to report that Antony came through like the champ he was. The Italian contingent pissed themselves stifling their laughing, squirming in their seats, but, hey, they really feared Antony, and weren’t game to go against him. In fact, their obvious, but politely contained reactions, probably got me some points from the judges.
Because, even though Antony and I were friends, I really needed his help if I was to get through this speech with any shred of self-respect left at all, especially since the Italian version of manhood in Norristown, Pennsylvania in 1963 did not extend to accepting even the title of my winning speech, “Love, My Thoughts.”
Well, I gave the speech, which I had written myself, and I won the contest.
I got a savings bond and a nice write-up in the local daily bladder that sponsored the event, and they printed my speech on the front page, below the fold.
I never studied International Law. I never went to New York University. But I did have another sort of life, and it brought me here to Australia, and to you this evening.
So, anyway, here’s the speech.
Just one more thing.
Now, these are the boy’s words. The boy that I was many years ago, not the man here now.
If I wrote now about “Love, My Thoughts”, I might not put it this way.
[See "Touch Reaction" below]
But I’ll tell you this, no lie, last night I discovered a part of who I used to be, and, thinking of that boy, and who he was, and what he became, I was pleasantly surprised at how lovely he was back then, and I began, through reading my own words from years ago, to see a little of that boy remaining, in this man.
And it makes me proud, to have had a Father like that.
“Love - My Thoughts.”
By John Peck
A. D. Eisenhower High School
Love is quiet, never loud. To me, love is a still silence of feeling. It is an emotion that is so much a part of you that it cannot be voiced or spoken of because to do so would be to kill it.
Although you direct this love toward someone special, it finds expression in many things you see, and in many different ways. If you are to live, it seems to me that you must feel these expressions as well.
In Autumn,
Love is a bird flying homeward across the last blue patch of sky in the dusk. It is the final ray of the sun which makes your cheek glow in the chill air of evening. It is a yellow leaf on an old oak. It is the smell of burning leaves carried across the lawn by the wispy smoke.
Love is bright yellow.
In Spring,
Love is the half-warm breeze bending the rich grass into waves, and the soft earth under newly-naked feet. It is the coolness of the water and the slime of the mossy stones in a creek, and the birds’ early morning calls after the Winter’s silence.
Love is pale green.
In Summer,
Love is an early morning swim in the knifing cold of a mountain lake. It is a long walk on bright sand under the blue sky with the clouds gliding by like weightless giants, and far-off cries of swimmers on the beach. And it is talk. Quiet talk under a tree in the late evening.
Love is deep blue.
In Winter,
Love is a walk over a field of crusty snow in the steady, piercing wind toward a friendly home. It is thick snowflakes on your lashes.
Love is white.
It starts in a small way, say hello. It is a look, a word, a gesture that changes friendship to love.
It is a large mallet striking a gong. There is no sound: only the vibration, the silent effect. Such is Love.
- The End -
Well, that was then. This next one is from the other side, 40-odd years later. This is the work that, once I found the Friend in Hand had stopped doing poetry evenings, I began to run them. Just so I could read this thing. The funny thing is that I've found renewal through the process of putting them on for the past 3 years; it's very pleasant to be the catalyst for the many voices of Sydney.
I performed this one across some old blues riffs a couple of years ago at the December Open Mike; further down there's a link to the performance if you're interested. The text is here as well.
Touch ReactionJack Peck, Sydney, October 22, 2006