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776 Roberta Scott Bunnell A friend once suggested that Roberta Scott Bunnell was a poor man’s Dorothy Parker. I said, “Roberta can write rings around Parker.” No one can write bittersweet poems about love and life with more incisiveness than Roberta Scott Bunnell. Born in 1910 in Paducah, she attended Logan College in Russellville and later the University of Louisville. She worked for many years at radio stations in Louisville. She has published in Cosmopolitan, Saturday Evening Post, and McCall’s, as well as in a multitude of local and regional publications. Gregg Swem, a former arts writer for the Courier-Journal, has written a one-woman show based on Bunnell’s life and poetry called Roberta . . . Dahling. Her poems are both sad and amusing. h “Four-Letter Word” One night you left in anger And told me where to go, And ever since, I’ve been there, I thought you’d like to know. “What If” What if the phone suddenly rings some late and lush spring night when I’m alone . . . and I should hear his voice again . . . saying “Hello!” What if I could answer, coolly, “How have you been?” and chat awhile about ordinary things . . . And then hang up, and put the night latch on . . . and murmur idly, to myself “Well that, I guess, is that” . . . and go to bed—and wait impatiently for the dawn. The author’s name 777 “Sonnet” How odd that I can see you on the street and have no feeling should we chance to meet, except a passing moment of concern that eyes, once tender, suddenly would turn the other way to keep from meeting mine; and strange that I can come upon some line we read together in a well-loved book and turn the page without a second look or hear a song we heard when first we met and have no aching feeling of regret. And yet, just now, my eyes were stung with mist of tears, because I happened on a list of laundry that I sent one day for you: shirts—8; shorts—6; socks—4; pajamas—2. “If I Should Be the First to Leave” If I should be the first to leave, and you Should lay me in a quiet resting place, Where I must be content to sleep alone Without the comfort of your loving face Beside me, as accustomed I have grown— O, rest I could, and possibly delight Staying for awhile in solitude, Peaceful and free in that eternal night— Except for one, insistent, chilling thought: That should you find some other after me (Which, in itself, I’m willing to admit Is only fair, and readily agree), That she—not I—would then be justly due To spend the last, unending night with you. Roberta Scott Bunnell 777 ...

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