pm01

Brother Morris (and all), are you familiar with the poetry of Robert Hayden. I have been reading him this weekend (can you recommend anything?) and particularly moved by these:

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?


The Whipping

The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighborhood
her goodness and his wrongs.

Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
pleads in dusty zinnias,
while she in spite of crippling fat
pursues and corners him.

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling
boy till the stick breaks
in her hand. His tears are rainy weather
to woundlike memories:

My head gripped in bony vise
of knees, the writhing struggle
to wrench free, the blows, the fear
worse than blows that hateful

Words could bring, the face that I
no longer knew or loved . . .
Well, it is over now, it is over,
and the boy sobs in his room,

And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged--
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.

MOJO

Beautiful words Brother PM! I love the term "chronic angers" and sometimes use it in family therapy sessions to try and convey how children might view their parents "occasional" blow-up or low level "grouchiness". I like this one of Haydens poems, based on an infamous prison not far from paradise:

The Prisoners


Steel doors – guillotine gates –
of the doorless house closed massively.
We were locked in with loss.

Guards frisked us, marked our wrists,
then let us into the drab Rec Hall –
splotched green walls, high windows barred –

where the dispossessed awaited us.
Hands intimate with knife and pistol,
hands that had cruelly grasped and throttled

clasped ours in welcome. I sensed the plea
of men denied: Believe us human
like yourselves, who but for Grace ...

We shared reprieving Hidden Words
revealed by the Godlike imprisoned
One, whose crime was truth.

And I read poems I hoped were true.
It's like you been there, brother, been there,
the scarred young lifer said.

Robert Hayden

Thanks for reminding us about Mr. Hayden Brother PM. How are things going for you these days?

pm01

Brother Morris, all is well here. I hope it's even better there for you. I'm bachelor'ing it for a few months so in respite I'm leaving for a weekend to read and maybe write.

Thank you for The Prisoners. Hayden was quite a writer despite his difficult childhood, or, maybe because of it. The Prisoners sent me searching through old books to find a similar poem: Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane by Etheridge Knight. If you haven't read it in a while, it's worth reading again, my friend. Sometimes it seems the dead can not be buried. Poems with a shadow are the best poems indeed.


http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/E...ge-Knight/7077