YOU'RE U.S. – pronounced "you're us"

Marcel Donaj

Salem, NY,2010

(Press play to hear Marcel’s Story)

Radio Production by Christopher Hoff

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Portrait by Emile B. Klein, oil on canvas, mounted on panel, 9×12″

(see face in person)

Journey of a “Pontiac Dancer”–

Marcel Donaj’ s life-journey has been a twisted braid of whiskered experience and strong  jawed emotion, wound tight with gentle laughter and tinges of pain.  Marcel spent his late teens dancing with a 1960 Pontiac; from York Beach to Williamstown, “ in two-and-a-half hours, flat!” As a young, work-ethic-laced father, the Boston Maine Railroad kept his direction true and his family alone.  Crates overflowing with black and white negatives and piles of memory-chipstored photographs await resurrection.  A self-proclaimed lover of automobiles and all things related,  Marcel is a driven-driver,  a builder of bridges,  an ex-tepee dweller,  and a known-to-be-no-billboard-immune,  graffiti artist.  The poem below is dedicated to this multilayered man. Gently peel apart the lines to see inside.

LeCram #5700

—
Down the plank of a steamship

in the arms of his mother

Raised in tall Greylock shadows

filled with immigrants proud

—-

Pontiac Dancer

Driving railroad-straight

or hill-climb fast

From York Beach,  M aine

to Green River Road

—

Woodstock hints

scattered and dear

Hippie-warm spirit

clings to a soul

—

Alive in rooms dark

heart full of bold

Cramming life into photographs

and blue-collar sweat

—-

eltbuS signs r4hymn

in Sunday night whispers

Graffiti up high

no Escalade safe

———-

Four decades in

a father proclaims,

“My son the artist”

will honor my name

Written by John Greenwood

John is a writer and poet living in upstate New York.