The birth of One-Cent
By Patrick T. Reardon
We named the baby One-Cent
after Oak’s father,
a short-hair railroad sweatback
I never met
but may have seen across the church
when I was yearning after
the lineless, sparkling high-school Oak,
a nun’s favorite, I was,
in Catholic grade school,
guarded, isolate, innocent except of pain.
Oak and I leaned toward each other.
One-Cent was a ticking bomb
we had to defuse for our own safety.
No one worried about the mechanism
when it was rendered undangerous,
but we failed to understand
the wily urge to exist.
Patrick T. Reardon
8.29.24
This poem originally appeared in The Seventh Quarry, Issue Forty, Summer/Autumn 2024.
Written by : Patrick T. Reardon
For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.