Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (34 page)
Paul Bettany (b. 1971) first came to prominence in the film
Gangster No. 1
(2000). He has gone on to appear in a wide variety of other films, including
A Beautiful
Mind
(2001),
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
(2003),
Dogville
(2003),
The Da Vinci Code
(2006),
Margin Call
(2011) and
Transcendence
(2014).
WILLIAM MATTHEWS
(1942–1997)
TOM MCCARTHY
My wife, who is also a poet, introduced me to this poem. She knows poems and she knows me. Of course it moved me. How could it not? The idea of how people struggle to connect
with art also deeply resonates with me. And how the artist struggles to connect with his audience and
remain true to . . . well, the truth. Regardless of the side you play for, citizen or artist,
the need to reach out, to connect, to feel and to affect is so satisfying and so elusive. The process is awkward, moving, funny, clumsy, desperate and occasionally wondrous. It’s essentially
human.
‘Sir, thank you. Sir.’ Straight to my heart.
A Poetry Reading at West Point
I read to the entire plebe class,
in two batches. Twice the hall filled
with bodies dressed alike, each toting
a copy of my book. What would my
shrink say, if I had one, about
such a dream, if it were a dream?
Question and answer time.
‘Sir,’ a cadet yelled from the balcony,
and gave his name and rank, and then,
closing
his parentheses, yelled
‘Sir’ again. ‘Why do your poems give
me a headache when I try
to understand them?’ he asked. ‘Do
you want that?’ I have a gift for
gentle jokes to defuse tension,
but this was not the time to use it.
‘I try to write as well as I can
what it feels like to be human,’
I started, picking my way care
fully, for he and I were, after
all, pained by the same dumb longings.
‘I try to say what I don’t know
how to say, but of course I can’t
get much of it down at all.’
By now I was sweating bullets.
‘I don’t want my poems to be hard,
unless the truth is, if there is
a truth.’ Silence hung in the hall
like a heavy fabric.
My own
head ached. ‘Sir,’ he yelled. ‘Thank you. Sir.’
(1997)
The actor, screenwriter and director Tom McCarthy (b. 1966) wrote and directed the films
The Station Agent (2003), The Visitor (2007) and Win Win
(2011).
His other screenplays include
Up
(2009) and
Million Dollar Arm
(2014). His numerous acting credits include
Meet the Parents
(2000),
Syriana
(2005),
Goodnight, and Good Luck
(2005) and
The Wire
(2008).
VICTORIA REDEL
(1959– )
BILLY COLLINS
I’m a grown man who reads a lot of poetry, but I cannot recall a single instance of being moved by a poem to sobbing – I mean shoulders shaking, face-in-the-hands
sobbing. If a poem begins to show signs that it might have me that way, there’s no time for me to break down emotionally. I’m too busy trying
to figure out how the poet is managing to
pull it off. But there is one reliable test of a poem’s power to unglue me – all I have to do is read it out loud to a class. After decades of teaching poetry, I can count on one hand
the poems that I find impossible to deliver to a room full of students without losing it; Victoria Redel’s ‘Bedecked,’ I have repeatedly discovered, is one of them.
Redel’s poem is a mother’s defence of her young son’s freedom to dress up whichever way he likes – including lots of accessories – as he innocently flouts the
conventions of ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ dress. The subject is interesting on its own, but the power of the poem lies in its direct address to its readers, the repeated ‘Tell
me’s’, and the escalating determination of the mother to make her
point. Judiciously, while she is protecting her son’s freedom of appearance, Redel is also granting the reader
his or her freedom of speech. You can tell me whatever you like, the mother allows, whatever ‘you
need
to tell me’. But then
comes the poem’s fierce
turn: ‘but keep far away from my son’, with its threatening implication of the reader. But as the poem begins to end, Redel’s joyful
display of how beauty’s ‘facets
set off prisms’ that ‘spin up everywhere’ as rainbows are cast from the boy’s ‘jeweled body’ is more than enough to convince us that ‘it’s fine
– really maybe even a good thing – a boy who’s got some girl to him’. The poem’s timing is perfect; its very last word is where tears are likely to overspill their
little banks.
Bedecked
Tell
me it’s wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy
store rings he clusters four jewels to each finger.
He’s bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star
choker, the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock.
Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says
sticker earrings look too fake.
Tell me I should teach him it’s wrong
to love the glitter that a
boy’s only a boy who’d love a truck with a remote that revs,
battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping
off tracks into the tub.
Then tell me it’s fine – really – maybe even a good thing – a boy
who’s got some girl to him,
and I’m right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw
in the park.
Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son
who still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means –
this way or that – but for the way facets set off prisms and
prisms spin up everywhere
and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows – made every
shining true color.
Now try to tell me – man or woman – your heart was
ever once that brave.
(2002)
Billy Collins (b. 1941) has served two terms as US Poet Laureate. His latest collection of poems, his fourteenth, is
Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems
2003–13
.
BILLY COLLINS
(1941– )
J. J. ABRAMS
I am the most recent poetry fan in the family. My wife, Katie, however, has long been a true lover of the form; she reads poetry every day, even edits volumes of her favourite
works. It comes easy to her in a way it never really did to me.
Except once.
Years ago, listening to NPR on my car radio,
I heard Billy Collins (at the time our country’s Poet Laureate) recite one of his poems entitled ‘The Lanyard’. It gripped me in a
way that poetry never had before. It was funny. It was relatable and profound and as I was driving down Washington Boulevard I had tears in my eyes.
‘The Lanyard’ is about the impossibility of ever paying back the ultimate gift a mother bestows upon a child.
I loved it so much I got a copy and gave it to my mom, who loved it as
well. Months later, in classic my mom form, she gave me a framed copy of the poem which she had somehow gotten signed by Mr Collins himself.
Katie and I have since been lucky enough to see Billy Collins perform his work in person. I have come to appreciate and, dare I say, even understand poetry, and now officially consider
myself a
convert.
This poem will always be one of my favourites. By sharing it with my mother, who has since passed away, I was able to at least acknowledge the fact that I could never repay
her for all she did for me. Her getting the framed poem for me was her way of saying I never had to. Loving her was enough.
The Lanyard
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly –
a past where I sat
at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and
white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made
at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift – not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
(2005)