Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (20 page)

Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online

Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden

TERRANCE HAYES

The kinds of poems that make a grown man cry are not necessarily the same poems that make a young man cry. Encountering Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1945 poem ‘The
Mother’ one lonely afternoon as a college painting major and basketball jock brought abundant tears. It is, in fact, the poem that made me choose
the path of a poet rather than that of a
painter. (No painting had ever made me cry.) The first word of ‘The Mother’ tells you some of what a young man could have experienced to be so moved by such a poem. That it continues to
move me as an adult is a testament to its craftsmanship. It is the only poem I know, for example, that shifts seamlessly from second-person address in the first stanza
to persona poem in the second
stanza. The poem begins speaking intimately
to
a mother and ends speaking
as
a mother. I’ve never tired of ‘The Mother’. Maybe the question is: can a poem make a man
cry more than once? One always hopes the poem that prompts tears can withstand the sobering, scrutinising gaze of time.

The Mother

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb

Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them, controlling
your luscious sigh,

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

 

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

Your luck

And your lives from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,

Your straight baby tears and your games,

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine? –

Since anyhow you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

 

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly,
and I loved, I loved you

All.

(1945)

Terrance Hayes (b. 1971) won the National Book Award for Poetry with his 2010 collection
Lighthead.
His previous collections are
Muscular Music
(1999),
Hip
Logic
(2002) and
Wind in a Box
(2006). His work has appeared in journals from the
Kenyon Review
to the
New Yorker.
He is a Professor of Creative
Writing at the University
of Pittsburgh.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

RANDALL JARRELL
(1914–65)

PAUL MULDOON

I stopped watching television news reporting in 1991, at precisely the moment we were first shown images purporting to represent ‘precision’ or ‘smart’
bombs falling on Iraq, including heavily populated cities such as Baghdad.

My main reason for giving up television news
reporting was that the element of reporting was now clearly absent and has remained absent pretty much ever since. More immediately, though, as
someone who had lived in Belfast between 1969 and 1986, I had a sense that bombs are neither precise nor smart.

What Randall Jarrell’s amazing five-line poem achieves for me is no less than bringing to the front of the mind the horror of modern warfare.
Written in 1945, it is a poem in dialogue with
Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ and ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, both collected in
The Wild Swans at Coole
(1919). The ‘ball
turret’ in the title of Jarrell’s poem is a de-romanticised version of Yeats’s signature ‘tower set on the stream’s edge’. Another poem to which Jarrell alludes
is Richard Eberhart’s ‘The Fury of
Aerial Bombardment’, also first published in 1945, with its frank final stanza:

Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill,

Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall

But they are gone to early death, who late in school

Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.

The ‘belt feed lever’ and the ‘belt holding pawl’, technical terms
which might easily have strayed from Henry Reed’s great nuts-and-bolts poem
‘Naming of Parts’, first published in 1942, are significant components of the machine guns lodged in the Plexiglas dome of the ball turret.

Though I think of this poem often, the thought of the unceremonious hosing from the turret of what’s left of the gunner never diminishes in power and never fails to make me weep.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

 

A ball turret was
a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner
tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the foetus in the womb. The
fighters
which attacked him were armed with cannon
firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose.


Jarrell’s note.

(1945)

The Irish poet Paul Muldoon (b. 1951) has published more than thirty collections, most recently
The Word on the Street
(2013). A Pulitzer and T. S. Eliot Prize winner, he
was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004. At Princeton University, he is the Howard
G. B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities and was founding chair of the Lewis Center for the
Arts. He is also Poetry Editor of
The New Yorker
.

War Has Been Brought into Disrepute

BERTOLT BRECHT
(1898–1956)

DAVID HARE

Reading this poem is like standing at the Cenotaph in London and hearing the first bars of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ Variation: it has the same extraordinary visceral
power that comes from something complete being said.

I very much admire a saying of Len Deighton’s which has the same
effect: ‘When old men decide to barter young men for pride and profit, the transaction is called war.’ All of
us who have lived through the last ten years know the relevance of both Brecht’s poem and Deighton’s observation.

War Has Been Brought into Disrepute

I hear it is being said in respectable circles

That from the moral point of view the Second World War

Did not come up to the First. The
Wehrmacht

Is said to deplore the means by which the SS

Effected the extermination of certain peoples. In the Ruhr

It seems, the Captains of Industry regret the bloody razzias

That filled their mines and factories with slaves. The intelligentsia

So I hear, condemn the industrialists’ demand for such slave workers

And their shabby treatment. Even the Bishops

Are distancing themselves from this way of waging war. In short

On all sides there is a feeling that unfortunately

The Nazis have done us a disservice and that war

Of itself a natural and necessary thing, by being conducted

On this occasion in so heedless and indeed inhuman a fashion

Has been, and
will be for quite some time

Discredited.

(c. 1945)

TRANSLATION BY DAVID CONSTANTINE

The British playwright and director Sir David Hare (b. 1947) has written some forty plays and TV scripts, among them
Plenty
(1978),
Licking Hitler
(1978),
Pravda
(1985, with Howard Brenton),
Strapless
(1989),
The Absence of War
(1993),
The Blue
Room
(1998) and
Stuff Happens
(2004)
.
He has also written
screenplays for such films as
The Hours
(2002) and
The Reader
(2008).

Le Message

JACQUES PRÉVERT
(1900–77)

Other books

Butterfly by Sylvester Stephens
A Perfect Likeness by Sandra Heath
Murder Most Maine by Karen MacInerney
Spirit Horses by Evans, Alan
Night Reigns by Dianne Duvall
Something Like Normal by Trish Doller
She's Asking for It! by Eve Kingsley