Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (28 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
Andrew Solomon (b.1963) won the 2001 National Book Award for
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
and named as one
of the London
Times
’s one hundred best books of the decade. His most recent book,
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
(2012), received the National
Book Critics Circle Award. An activist in the fields of mental health, LGBT rights, education and the arts, he is also the author of
The Irony Tower
(1991) and a novel,
A Stone Boat
(1994), as well
as numerous award-winning articles for major US newspapers, magazines and academic journals.
JOHN N. MORRIS
(1931–1997)
TOBIAS WOLFF
I have raised three children, and lived through this very moment with each of them, not only in watching them learn to swim, but in sending them off for their first day of
school – watching them wave uncertainly, bravely, from the window of the vanishing bus; handing them the keys
to the car for their first solo run; sending them away to college, to foreign
countries, to romance and marriage – learning to stand back, ‘doing nothing’, as they enter the deep water.
And this poem always makes it happen again for me: that sense of my children needing help, needing me, that helplessness, that desolation of letting go, that joy in their courage, their hunger
for all of
life’s possibilities and hazards. And always the knowledge, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake, sometimes jangling like an alarm, that in the end they will follow where I am
bound, whatever the skill and struggle that has kept us afloat. They will learn to let go, as I am still learning to let go. I never did anything harder.
For Julia, in the Deep Water
The instructor
we hire
because she does not love you
Leads you into the deep water,
The deep end
Where the water is darker –
Her open, encouraging arms
That never get nearer
Are merciless for your sake.
You will dream this water always
Where nothing draws nearer,
Wasting your valuable breath
You will scream for your mother
–
Only your mother is drowning
Forever in the thin air
Down at the deep end.
She is doing nothing,
She never did anything harder.
And I am beside her.
I am beside her in this imagination.
We are waiting
Where the water is darker.
You are over your head,
Screaming, you are learning
Your way toward us,
You are learning how
In the helpless water
It is with our skill
We live in what kills us.
(1976)
The books of Tobias Wolff (b. 1945) include the memoirs
This Boy’s Life
(1989) and
In Pharaoh’s Army
:
Memories of the Lost
War
(1994); the short novel
The Barracks Thief
(1984); the novel
Old School
(2003); and four
collections of short stories,
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
(1981),
Back in the World
(1985),
The Night in Question
(1997) and, most recently,
Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories
(2008). He has also edited several anthologies,
among them
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories
(1994). He is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the Humanities
at Stanford University.
PHILIP LARKIN
(1922–85)
WILLIAM SIEGHART
Philip Larkin has, amongst his many gifts, an extraordinary ability to embrace a feeling or thought that the rest of us would quickly strike from our mind because it was so
disturbing, and examine that thought properly and turn it into a poem. ‘Aubade’ is the supreme example of this. Waking up in the
middle of the night and worrying about one’s death
is an experience we all can recognise, one that most of us would rather not spend too much time thinking about. Yet Larkin does the opposite and constructs a poem of universal relevance without the
conceit of poetic obfuscation. I think it is one of the finest poems written in the last half of the twentieth century and, however many times I read
or recite it, the eyes inevitably begin to
moisten.
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where
and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
– The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may
never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to
pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says
No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel,
not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different
whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to
rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
(1977)
After cofounding Forward Publishing in 1986, the British entrepreneur and philanthropist William Sieghart (b. 1960) launched the influential Forward Prizes for Poetry in 1992
and two years later National
Poetry Day, which sees poetry celebrated around the UK each October. In 2012, to mark the London Olympic and Paralympic Games, he launched Winning Words, a public art
project to place poetry in public places, as well as editing an anthology of that title.
W
.
S
.
GRAHAM
(1918–86)
NICK LAIRD
I’m not sure any poem has made me cry exactly, but there are many poems I find very moving. Some come to mind immediately: Edward Thomas’s ‘Rain’ or
‘Old Man’, Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Remembering My Father’, Heaney’s ‘Clearances’ sequence, Les Murray’s ‘The Mitchells’, Frank
O’Hara’s ‘Having a Coke
with You’, Rilke’s Eighth Elegy, Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, George Herbert’s ‘The Pearl’. But today I’ll opt
for W. S. Graham’s ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’, which, along with his poems ‘Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch’ and ‘Private Poem to Norman MacLeod’, says
something lean and direct about the strengths and limitations of friendship, about how far one can journey from the ‘ego house’, as Graham calls it in the
MacLeod poem, and suggests
that poetry, ‘a kind / Of news of no time’, is a way to practise talking with the dead.