It was a Small Town by Sue Ellen Thompson

Editor’s Note: Perhaps relying on that extraordinary intuition that comes with being a poet, Sue Ellen Thompson felt a noticeable mood shift in her hometown a few years ago. Well before the Oxford community exploded with the dismissal of a popular town police chief, Thompson sensed that the town where she and her husband had lived for over two decades was becoming politically toxic. In response, Sue Ellen composed a poem about her dismay at the growing polarization but also her unaltered affection for Oxford. 

It was a Small Town

which made everything
that happened there look
huge. The holiday parades
were endless, coursing
through the streets
like floodwater.
Parties overflowed
as well, channeled
by the narrow chambers
of what had once been
watermen’s modest houses.

Almost everyone who lived there
had been Somebody once.
Widowed now, or simply
retired, they inflicted
their formidable talents
on a one-room library
and small stone church.

In summer, when the town
sprayed weekly for mosquitos
after midnight, those
who remembered it was Tuesday
and brought their pets indoors
talked of it the whole next day,
inviting praise for their vigilance,
while those who’d left
their windows open
quietly prepared to die.

Low-lying and surrounded
on three sides by water, it afforded
little opportunity for harsh words
to evaporate. Instead, they often pooled
into final severings. Small disagreements
took root in the flood-softened earth
and spread like trumpet vine, dividing
entire neighborhoods into plaintiffs
and defendants. Why would anyone,

you might ask, want
to live there? Because every year
there was a day in early summer
when the first magnolia grandiflora
bent down low, distributing
its fleshy bowls to the poor and hungry,
of whom there were none and all
were lost in its vast perfume.

This video is approximately one minute in length.

This is just one of the poems Sue Ellen will read when she returns to the Stoltz Listening Room on September 25th for the first of four Spy Nights this fall to support the Avalon Foundation and the Talbot Spy. Her special guest will Beth Dulin, last year’s winner of the Eastern Shore Writers Association’s 2023 poetry competition. Beth will share some of those award-winning poems along with new ones.  Tickets are available here.