Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (29 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
Dear Bryan Wynter
1
This is only a note
To say how sorry I am
You died. You will realise
What a position it puts
Me in. I couldn’t really
Have died for you if so
I were inclined. The carn
Foxglove
here on the wall
Outside your first house
Leans with me standing
In the Zennor wind.
Anyhow how are things?
Are you still somewhere
With your long legs
And twitching smile under
Your blue hat walking
Across a place? Or am
I greedy to make you up
Again out of memory?
Are you there at all?
I would
like to think
You were all right
And not worried about
Monica and the children
And not unhappy or bored.
2
Speaking to you and not
Knowing if you are there
Is not too difficult.
My words are used to that.
Do you want anything?
Where shall I send something?
Rice-wine, meanders, paintings
By your
contemporaries?
Or shall I send a kind
Of news of no time
Leaning against the wall
Outside your old house.
The house and the whole moor
Is flying in the mist.
3
I am up. I’ve washed
The front of my face
And here I stand looking
Out over the top
Half of my bedroom window.
There almost as far
As I can see I see
St Buryan’s church tower.
An inch to the left, behind
That dark rise of woods,
Is where you used to lurk.
4
This is only a note
To say I am aware
You are not here. I find
It difficult to go
Beside Housman’s star
Lit fences without you.
And nobody will laugh
At my jokes
like you.
5
Bryan, I would be obliged
If you would scout things out
For me. Although I am not
Just ready to start out.
I am trying to be better,
Which will make you smile
Under your blue hat.
I know I make a symbol
Of the foxglove on the wall.
It is because it knows you.
(c. 1977)
Nick Laird (b. Northern Ireland, 1975) worked as a litigator for several years before leaving to write full-time. He has published three collections of poetry,
To a Fault
(2005),
On Purpose
(2007) and
Go Giants
(2013), and two novels,
Utterly Monkey
(2005) and
Glover’s Mistake
(2009). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature and teaches at Princeton University.
WENDELL BERRY
(1934– )
COLUM MCCANN
The only person who truly wants to admit to crying over a poem is the poet herself or himself. Most poems don’t come like a burning bush or a pillar of light. They are
worked and worried into being. But when they finally emerge they should have the appearance of absolute ease. Poets are so much like dancers
who ruin their ankles for the sake of a moment’s
beauty in the air. The fact is that they occasionally soar. So much craft goes into the making of a poem that I imagine most poets would be delighted to learn that someone else, other than
themselves, has cried over it. Still, it can happen. And, like most men, I’m more easily moved to tears than I’m prepared to tell anyone. I don’t know a
poem that consistently
brings a tear to my eye, but I can always count on Wendell Berry’s ‘A Meeting’ to create wine from water. It’s a beautiful poem, not meant to make us cry, but to celebrate
the passing of loved ones. I read it recently at the wake of a good friend. It did indeed make me weep then, though there are other times it simply breaks open the day.
I have developed a favourite
thing at Christmastime, where I ask my kids to learn a poem off by heart and ‘give’ it to me rather than a pair of socks or yet another scarf. It’s
my favourite moment of the whole year.
I give them a poem and they learn it. Sometimes the poems are wildly different, from ‘A Meeting’ to ‘The Lovesong of
J. Alfred Prufrock’. But this Berry poem will always be theirs, and therefore mine.
Berry is a poet who has a singular refusal to engage with the sentimental and yet is always brave enough to engage the necessity of sentiment. We are, all of us, going to end up under some
mighty fine trees. All good poems come around to other poems. I suppose the question is, ‘Do we dare to eat the peach?’ In Berry’s world, we always do.
A Meeting
In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: ‘How you been?’
He grins and looks at me.
‘I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.’
(1980)
The novels of the Irish writer Colum McCann (b. 1965) range from
Fishing the Sloe-Black River
(1994) and
Songdogs
(1995) to
Zoli
(2006),
Let the Great
World Spin
(National Book Award, 2009) and
TransAtlantic
(2013). He is Professor of Creative Writing at Hunter College, New York.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
(1920–94)
MIKE LEIGH
Near the bone. Strikes a chord. Takes me back. Hits a nerve. Brings a lump.
eulogy to a hell of a dame –
some dogs who sleep at night
must dream of bones
and I remember your bones
in flesh
and best
in that dark green dress
and those high-heeled bright
black shoes,
you always cursed when you
drank,
your hair coming down you
wanted to explode out of
what was holding you:
rotten memories of a
rotten
past, and
you finally got
out
by dying,
leaving me with the
rotten
present;
you’ve been
dead
28 years
yet I remember you
better than any of
the rest;
you were the only one
who understood
the futility of the
arrangement of
life;
all the others were only
displeased with
trivial segments,
carped
nonsensically about
nonsense;
Jane, you were
killed by
knowing too much.
here’s a drink
to your bones
that
this dog
still
dreams about.
(1984)
The television and feature films made by the writer and director Mike Leigh (b. 1943) include
Bleak Moments
(1971)
, High Hopes
(1988)
,
Life Is Sweet
(1990)
, Naked
(Best Director, Cannes, 1993),
Secrets
and Lies
(winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, 1996),
Career Girls
(1997),
Topsy-Turvy
(1999),
Vera Drake
(winner of the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion, 2004),
Happy-Go-Lucky
(2008) and
Another Year
(2010)
.
He has also written and directed stage plays including
Abigail’s Party
(1977) and, most recently,
Grief
(2011).
: ‘Sonnet XLIII’
DEREK WALCOTT
(1930– )
MARK HADDON
I have never much liked sentiment in poetry, and sentimentality is the death knell for pretty much all literature (‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of
Little Nell without laughing,’ as Oscar Wilde reportedly said). It doesn’t happen often, but what moves me most profoundly
is the sublime sublimely articulated, a feeling that language
has somehow taken me beyond the boundary of language. For obvious reasons it’s hard to say precisely how this happens – though Shakespeare’s poetry does it most often – but
it’s close to the feeling I get in certain landscapes or standing under a starry sky on a clear night, a kind of ecstasy which is neither happiness nor sadness
nor fear nor contentment but
some paradoxical combination of all four.