Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (9 page)
Requiem
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you ’grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
(1880–1884)
Once a speechwriter to President George H. W. Bush, which resulted in his first comic novel,
The White House Mess
(1986), Christopher Buckley (b. 1952)
has published
numerous satirical novels including
Thank You for Smoking
(1994), which was filmed by Jason Reitman;
Little Green Men
(1999);
No Way to Treat a First Lady
(2002);
Florence
of Arabia
(2004);
Boomsday
(2007);
Supreme Courtship
(2008); and
They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?
(2012). He is also the author of
Losing Mum and Pup
(2009), a
memoir about his parents, William and Pat Buckley.
His next book is
But Enough About You
, a collection of essays.
A. E. HOUSMAN
(1859–1936)
JOE KLEIN
Both my parents passed away in the winter of 2011–12. They had been together for eighty-six years, since their first day of kindergarten. My father lasted only a few
weeks after my mother went; his will to live sapped visibly the moment I told him she was gone. ‘Is it definite?’ he asked.
At the same time, my wife and I were in the midst of a major television-watching project: all thirty-three episodes of
Inspector Morse
in chronological order. There are no twelve-step
programmes for British-mystery lovers. We’re addicted, and Morse – irascible, imbibing, extravagantly literate and mysteriously first-nameless (it turned out to be
‘Endeavour’) – was a favourite.
We came to
the final episode a week after my father died and I began to blub – decorously, blotting the corner of my eye with an index finger, but in full blub all the same – when
Morse, played by the brilliant John Thaw, recited the Housman. It was triply poignant. Morse was dying. Thaw was near death himself. My parents had just passed away. When I later read the poem, I
was slightly disappointed. ‘Ensanguining’
the skies seemed a bit much . . . until I read it aloud, and the funereal metre reasserted itself. I miss Morse, Thaw and, of
course, my parents. But the poem remains, a reminder of grief so pure that it can also cleanse.
The Remorseful Day
Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further
to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.
(c. 1896)
Originally as Anonymous, Joe Klein (b. 1946) wrote
Primary Colors
(1996), subsequently filmed by Mike Nichols. A political columnist for
Time
magazine since 2003,
he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Guggenheim Fellow.
ANTONIO MACHADO
(1875–1939)
ROBERT BLY
This is a poem about the many losses that everybody, men and women, go through in life. The older you get, the more gardens you have abandoned. What else is there to do? Now
you see how many old friends are gone, and how things didn’t turn out the way you had hoped.
The Wind, One Brilliant Day
The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an aroma of jasmine.
‘In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.’
‘I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead.’
‘Well then, I’ll take the waters of the fountains,
and the withered petals
and the yellow leaves.’
The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
‘What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?’
(c. 1903)
TRANSLATION BY ROBERT BLY
The poet, author, and activist Robert Bly (b. 1926) is best known for his 1990 work
Iron John: A Book About Men
, which spent sixty-two weeks
on the
New York Times
bestseller list. An influential editor of poetry magazines and anthologies, he has also published some twenty volumes of poetry, sixteen volumes of translation and nine works of nonfiction.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
(1875–1926)
COLM TÓIBÍN
What is strange is how much coiled emotion a single declaratory sentence can have. In this translation, Mitchell trusts the words. They will do the work. ‘Nothing else
was red’ stops you, suggests that this is a real landscape, rather than one which is mythological, or that it is
oddly and vividly both, and all the more powerful and present for that. Then,
the elaborate description of landscape begins again to be followed once more by a single sentence: ‘Down this path they were coming.’ The poem is filled with hardness. Orpheus is
‘mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.’ He is desperate to get her back, it is not just a dream or an ancient myth, it is you now. Death
comes here as both unforgiving and
relentless, but it is also an active state. ‘She was filled with her own vast death’ has the power to console as much as to suggest completion, finality. She will be too busy, too
distracted to notice who is ahead. The man who loved her will be merely ‘someone or other’; he will have been too impatient. The dead will not come back, but the words will, and the
words will be filled with sad wisdom as the woman who was so loved will move into eternity, or nothing much, or perhaps nothing at all, in ways that are ‘uncertain, gentle, and without
impatience’.
Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes
That was the deep uncanny mine of souls.
Like veins of silver ore, they silently
moved through its massive darkness. Blood welled
up
among the roots, on its way to the world of men,
and in the dark it looked as hard as stone.
Nothing else was red.
There were cliffs there,
and forests made of mist. There were bridges
spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake
which hung above its distant bottom
like the sky on a rainy day above a landscape.
And through the gentle, unresisting meadows
one pale path unrolled like a strip of cotton.
Down this path they were coming.
In front, the slender man in the blue cloak –
mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.
In large, greedy, unchewed bites his walk
devoured the path; his hands hung at his sides,
tight and heavy,
out of the falling folds,
no longer conscious of the delicate lyre
which had grown into his left arm, like a slip
of roses grafted onto an olive tree.
His senses felt as though they were split in two:
his sight would race ahead of him like a dog,
stop, come back, then rushing off again
would stand, impatient, at the path’s next turn, –
but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind.
Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached
back to the footsteps of those other two
who were to follow him, up the long path home.
But then, once more, it was just his own steps’ echo,
or the wind inside his cloak, that made the sound.
He said to himself, they had to be behind him;
said it aloud and heard it fade away.
They had to be behind him, but their steps
were ominously soft. If only he could
turn around, just once (but looking back
would ruin this entire work, so near
completion), then he could not fail to see them,
those other two, who followed him so softly:
The god of speed and distant messages,
a traveler’s hood above his shining eyes,
his slender staff held out in front of him,
and little wings fluttering at his ankles;
and on his left arm, barely touching it: she.
A woman so loved that from one lyre there came
more lament than from all lamenting women;
that a whole world of lament arose, in which
all nature reappeared:
forest and valley,
road and village, field and stream and animal;
and that around this lament-world, even as
around the other earth, a sun revolved
and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-
heaven, with its own, disfigured stars – :
So greatly was she loved.
But now she walked beside the graceful god,
her steps constricted by the
trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy
with child, and did not see the man in front
or the path ascending steeply into life.
Deep within herself. Being dead
filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit
suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,
she was filled
with her vast death, which was so new,
she could not understand that it had happened.
She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.
She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.
She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.
She was already root.
And when,
abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around – ,
she could not understand, and softly answered
Who?
Far away,
dark before the shining exit-gates,
someone or other stood, whose features were
unrecognizable. He stood and saw
how, on the strip
of road among the meadows,
with a mournful look, the god of messages
silently turned to follow the small figure
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
(1904)
TRANSLATION BY STEPHEN MITCHELL