Saved by Sam McGee by Mary “Ray” Goehring

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

at first it was a joke

reading The Cremation of Sam McGee

to my college roommate

the speech class assignment 

to recite a memorized poem

making me shudder—

memories of snickering classmates 

my laughing jag while giving a speech 

teasing siblings waiting to pounce—

but my roommate saw its potential.

So, in the evenings 

we hitched to the off-campus bar

with copies of the poem,

drank 25 cent beers

and saw who could remember more passages.

There are strange things done

in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold

we proclaimed as we lifted each new tap

And on our chilly walk back to the dorm

sang to the lightless houses 

the Arctic trail has its secret tales

that would make your blood run cold

In the hall and up the stairs to our rooms

we confessed and

hurried, horror driven-- 

with a corpse half hid that I couldn’t get rid

because of a promise given

It took about a week

for both of us to memorize it

and I, in my speech class, 

performed without a glitch.

Now, 50 years later,

there aren’t many things 

I can recite from memory

But somehow 

etched into parts of my primitive brain

I still can recall  

That night on the marge of Lake Labarge

I cremated Sam McGee.

Mary Ray Goehring was born and raised in Wisconsin where as a child she spent afternoons with her dad at Shannon's Tavern drinking cokes and listening to the jukebox.  On special occasions, eating at one of the local Supper Clubs--essentially a pub that serves food to folks of all ages.  A retired Landscape Designer she now migrates between her central Wisconsin prairie home and the pine forests of East Texas.  A member of both the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and The Poetry Society of Texas she has been published in a variety of online and print journals and anthologies among them are the recently released James Crews Anthology, The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy, Steam Ticket Review, The Blue Heron Review, Bramble, Your Daily Poem and Texas Poetry Calendar.