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GREENSBORO — Isaiah Enoch has to get around his small apartment in a wheelchair. But he doesn’t let that stop his busy mind.

He collects boxes that once held cereal, detergent and diapers. He cuts them, glues them and decorates them for what he calls “special people’’ by using markers to paint trees, cacti and geometric figures of almost every shape.

Then, with a little ingenuity culled from his decades in maintenance, he creates. He turns them into notebooks, pencil holders, file folders and sturdy pages to hold his life of memories.

And Enoch has some memories. He’s 87.

Dig into his notebooks, flip through his pages and you can still catch the faint smell of laundry detergent.

But that’s not what gets you. It’s his words.

No, not his spoken word. Enoch is hard to understand. His words run together because a stroke two years ago turned his eloquent phrases into a frequent mumble.

But read his words, his verse.  Enoch has been called a “golden poet’’ and won awards for his work because he ties together words ever so well to unearth what he calls the “beauty within.’’

He works at it. He gets up early and reads his Bible first — he’s already read it through twice. Then, with a thick dictionary at his elbow, enveloped with a cardboard cover he made himself, Enoch sits at a makeshift desk in his bedroom and writes for three, four, five hours at a time.

He gets so engrossed he forgets to eat. Meredith Enoch, his educator daughter, his only child, has to remind him when she visits.

But he keeps at it because he feels he has lots to say in sturdy script.

Sometimes, he writes about people. Sometimes, he writes about his surroundings. And sometimes, he writes about his life. Like fighting in World War II.

Enoch and 2,000 other American soldiers tried to free the prisoners held in a place synonymous with death. Enoch stormed Dachau, the infamous Nazi concentration camp where more than 25,000 prisoners died. Enoch was only 22 at the time.

He and the other soldiers were captured, spent nine months as prisoners of war and given one meal a day. They survived, Enoch said, because they thought about home.

And ironically, in a place of death, Enoch learned about life.

He says he learned about togetherness and the importance of beauty, home and treating people humanely in an inhumane place.

When Enoch returned to Greensboro, he settled into a working-class life that embodied what he learned.

Enoch became an assistant scoutmaster, a foster parent and a singer in the Greensboro Oratorio Society. He became the first black maintenance man for two iconic names of Greensboro manufacturing: Vick Chemical and Guilford Mills.

It was only after his retirement in 1986 that Enoch — a Summerfield native and self-described “strong guy out of the country’’ — began to write poetry.

He found his gift.

He joined the Burlington Writers Club. In 1989, he wrote a poem that won him the “Golden Poet Award.’’ In March, he wrote President Obama.

In his seven-page, hand-written letter, he wrote on lined paper about the reverence and honor along the Potomac.

He also included a stamp-collection sheet he made himself for Obama to give to his daughters.

A stamp-collection sheet? Enoch’s long fingers just dance when he explains it.

“I know he gets a lot of mail,’’ Enoch says, his voice rising. “But I bet you no one in the United States will send his daughters a stamp collection sheet made out of construction paper.’’

That is probably true. But see and read what Enoch creates. He’s a man with a 10th-grade education, the middle child from a poor farmer’s family of 10 who lost his father when he was only 3.

Yet here, in the twilight of his life, he can turn discarded cardboard into folk art, construction paper into a gift and words into poetry, printed blocky and big, that include line after line that sing.

Enoch, the warrior-poet, says he wants to leave something behind, some sort of legacy to share.

He is. No doubt, he is.
 

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com