Group
Portrait with Ukuleles
by Keith
Ratzlaff
This is Michael Carey for Voices from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s poem "Group Portrait With Ukuleles" by Keith Ratzlaff, is about coming of age in a small school that couldn’t afford instruments or really a music teacher. All they were able to get their hands on were a bunch of cheap ukuleles. The music program consisted of a group of 25 teenage boys imagining they were tough, cool, sexy men while belting out old standards on this exotic instrument. This tenderly absurd but true portrait becomes the focus of meditations on who we are, where we go, and if it really makes all that much difference, in the end, where we started from.
Group Portrait with Ukuleles
Once I was a boy
in a classroom
of boys learning to play
the ukulele. In the end, even
the stumpfingered
learned three chords:
G, C, D7. Our big felt picks,
our whiny
little strings. We were part
of the American Folksong
Revival
in spite of ourselves,
in spite of our penises
and voices
rising and falling like elevators.
Imagine us, our 25 faces
still forming,
heads slightly out of round,
singing "I Gave My Love
A Cherry,"
or "Big Rock Candy Mountain."
There was the recital
we never gave
because, to tell the truth,we weren’t very good.
One boy is dead
now, three are welders,
two joined the Navy, one
sells used cars,
half a dozen are farmers,
one has been convicted
of exporting
Nazi literature to Germany.
I don’t remember any of us
as mortal
or talented or cruel.
All we ever learned was that
chord progression,
knowable and sequential –
beautiful as gears shifting –
something useful
and at the bottom of all
the music we imagined we
could care about.
We knew who Mozart was
but there wasn’t any Mozart
for the ukulele.
That would have been wrong
and we knew it – some
of us.
Or none
of us. Either way
"Group Portrait With Ukuleles"
by Keith Ratzlaff from his book Man Under A Pear Tree published by Anhinga
Press.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.
Biography
Keith Ratzlaff is from Pella, Iowa. Mr. Ratzlaff was born and raised across the Missouri river in Henderson, NE a predominantly Mennonite town of 800 people.