Waiting In The Children's Hospital - Clarence Major

I reflect on this desperate note
while waiting in the children's hospital.
The desperate cry my son left
cold as ice in his closed eyes after poison.

Benches of blood. This is a wooden tragedy.

Joyce & I walked home under the huge night
thru a grand sweep and
around midnight I scribble a letter to my sister,
who is dying five minutes at a time:
            You are the flower of confusion
            coming up in the morning
            of my love and
            going tightly shut in the afternoon of
            anger. Anger & bitterness.
                                         I look forward to your resurrection.

 I get up tonight and walk naked
through the wet weeds. The moon is smiling
and it has no teeth.

I walk home less, the huge night in me.

I remember a trillion stars in the Lexington night
above all shadows ahead of me but
I cannot remember the feeling
of a little girl's kiss.       Do you remember?

I remember I walked to town with a blind
man beside me singing or was he humming.

That same summer of a trillion grasshoppers. And
I loved him through & beyond his blackness.
His woman in a shack beside the highway
with four grandbabies in a wooden bed;
fanning summer flies from the syrup on their lips.

But the blood is white this summer.

Roasted ears. The hog season & my uncle
with a good shot. The blood is red this summer
redder than redbirds.

I felt that I had to go along in silence
with the heart of a monk, face flat to the earth
arms outstretched. & when I got up
I walked close to walls.
I moved with my head low and my hands hidden
like a starved Christian, meaning
to do this forever.


[From:
Major, C. (1970) Swallow the lake. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, p41 - p42]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Martha - Audre Lorde

Martha this is a catalog of days passing before you looked again. Someday you will browse and order them at will, or in your necessities. I have taken a house at the Jersey shore this summer. It is not my house. Today the lightning bugs came. On the first day you were dead. With each breath the skin of your face moved falling in like crumpled muslin. We scraped together the smashed image of flesh preparing a memory. No words. No words. On the eighth day you startled the doctors speaking from your deathplace to reassure us that you were trying. Martha these are replacement days should you ever need them given for those you once demanded and never found. May this trip be rewarding; no one can fault you again Martha for answering necessity too well and the gods who honor hard work will keep this second coming free from that lack of choice which hindered your first journey to this Tarot house. They said no hope no dreaming accept this case of flesh as evi
Read more

To My Daughter The Junkie On A Train - Audre Lorde

Children we have not borne bedevil us by becoming themselves painfully sharp and unavoidable like a needle in our flesh. Coming home on the subway from a PTA meeting of minds committed like murder or suicide to their own private struggle a long-legged girl with a horse in her brain slumps down beside me begging to be ridden asleep for the price of a midnight train free from desire. Little girl on the nod if we are measured by the dreams we avoid then you are the nightmare of all sleeping mothers rocking back and forth the dead weight of your arms locked about our necks heavier than our habit of looking for reasons. My corrupt concern will not replace what you once needed but I am locked into my own addictions and offer you my help, one eye out for my own station. Roused and deprived your costly dream explodes into a terrible technicoloured laughter at my failure up and down across the aisle women avert their eyes as the other mothers who became usel
Read more

Vespers - Louise Glück (from Wild Iris)

You thought we didn't know. But we knew once, children know these things. Don't turn away now—           we inhabited a lie to appease you. I remember sunlight of early spring, embankments netted with dark vinca. I remember lying in a field, touching my brother's body. Don't turn away now; we denied memory to console you. We mimicked you, reciting the terms of our punishment. I remember some of it, not all of it: deceit begins as forgetting. I remember small things, flowers growing under the hawthorn tree, bells of the wild scilla. Not all, but enough to know you exist: who else had reason to create mistrust between a brother and sister but the one who profited, to whom we turned in solitude? Who else would so envy the bond we had then as to tell us it was not earth but heaven we were losing? [From: Glück, L. (1992) The Wild Iris . Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, p44]
Read more