Dear Loretta,

by Sharon Waller Knutson

 
I was never a Coal Miners Daughter
from Butchers Hollow, never got
pregnant in my teens and never could
carry a tune but I worshipped you
when bare foot and pregnant you took the stage
in the sixties and shocked the country
singing songs you penned about birth control,
and fist fighting with floozies
who were sleeping with your husband
while birthing and bathing six babies.
I cheered when you humbly accepted eight
Country Music Awards including the first
female Country Entertainer of the Year
half a century ago. I worried when you
suffered a stroke and then fractured
your hip after falling off the stage
in your mid-eighties. I cried when barely
two weeks after you warbled
your last note at the age of ninety,
your successors, sixty something
redheaded Reba and thirty-nine-year-old
blondes Carrie and Miranda
sang your songs at the CMA Awards,
hoping your spirit would make one
of the blondes the first CMA female
entertainer of the year in ten years
and only the eighth in fifty-nine
years. Since they lost to a male,
please be an angel and finish
your work, Loretta.


* * * * *
 
Sharon Waller Knutson is a retired journalist who lives in Arizona. She has published nine poetry books including My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields (Flutter Press 2014,) What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Say and Trials & Tribulations of Sports Bob (Kelsay Books 2021), and Survivors, Saints and Sinners and Kiddos & Mamas Do the Darndest Things (Cyberwit 2022). Her work has also appeared recently in Discretionary Love, Impspired, GAS Poetry, Art and Music, The Rye Whiskey Review, Black Coffee Review, Lothlorien Review, Silver Birch Press, ONE ART, The Drabble, Spillwords, Muddy River Review, Verse-Virtual, Your Daily Poem, Red Eft Review, and The Five-Two.