Written by
Anthony Hecht |
1992
1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.
2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into
confetti.
A loaf of bread cost a million marks.
Of
course I do not remember this.
3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me.
The
world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.
4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building
with bells.
A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.
5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones
and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.
7) My country was struck by history more deadly than
earthquakes or hurricanes.
8) My father was busy eluding the monsters.
My mother
told me the walls had ears.
I learned the burden of secrets.
9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights
of adolescence.
10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun
and the moon across the ocean.
My grandparents stayed
behind in darkness.
11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast.
Eventually
I caught up with them.
12) When I met you, the new language became the language
of love.
13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry.
The daughter became a mother of daughters.
14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it.
Knots tying
threads to everywhere.
The past pushed away, the future left
unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate
present.
15) Years and years of this.
16) The children no longer children.
An old man's pain, an
old man's loneliness.
17) And then my father too disappeared.
18) I tried to go home again.
I stood at the door to my
childhood, but it was closed to the public.
19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone's face was younger
than mine.
20) So far, so good.
The brilliant days and nights are
breathless in their hurry.
We follow, you and I.
|
Written by
Anthony Hecht |
As though it were reluctant to be day,
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Morning deploys a scale
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Of rarities in gray,
And winter settles down in its chain-mail,
Victorious over legions of gold and red.
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The smokey souls of stones,
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Blunt pencillings of lead,
Pare down the world to glintless monotones
Of graveyard weather, vapors of a fen
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We reckon through our pores.
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Save for the garbage men,
Our children are the first ones out of doors.
Book-bagged and padded out, at mouth and nose
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They manufacture ghosts,
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George Washington's and Poe's,
Banquo's, the Union and Confederate hosts',
And are themselves the ghosts, file cabinet gray,
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Of some departed us,
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Signing our lives away
On ferned and parslied windows of a bus.
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