Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (30 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
And Derek Walcott’s poem? It’s the details, to begin with, the sky flickering like a TV set, those ‘teeth broken as dice’, the way it then breaks free from history and
geography, sweeping us upward to a high, cold point from which we find ourselves looking down on all time and space in the company of an old man for
whom it means nothing, who simply turns his pony
round and walks away into the endless, white forest.
Midsummer
: ‘Sonnet XLIII’
Chicago’s avenues, as white as Poland.
A blizzard of heavenly coke hushes the ghettos.
The scratched sky flickers like a TV set.
Down Michigan Avenue, slow as the glacial prose
of historians, my taxi crawls. The
stalled cars are as frozen
as the faces of cloaked queues on a Warsaw street,
or the hands of black derelicts flexing over a fire-
barrel under the El; above, the punctured sky
is needled by rockets that keep both Empires high.
It will be both ice and fire. In the sibyl’s crystal
The globe is shaken with ash, with a child’s frisson.
It’ll
be like this. A bird cry will sound like a pistol
down the avenues. Cars like dead horses, their muzzles
foaming with ice. From the cab’s dashboard, a tinny
dispatcher’s voice warns of more snow. A picture
lights up the set – first, indecipherable puzzles;
then, in plain black and white, a snow slope with pines
as shaggy as the manes of barbarian
ponies;
then, a Mongol in yak’s skin, teeth broken as dice,
grinning at the needles of the silent cities
of the plains below him up in the Himalayas,
who slaps the snow from his sides and turns away as,
in lance-like birches, the horde’s ponies whinny.
(1984)
Mark Haddon (b. 1962) is an author, illustrator
and screenwriter who has written fifteen books for children and won two BAFTAs. His best-selling novel,
The Curious Incident
of the Dog in the Night-time
(2003),
won seventeen literary prizes, including the Whitbread Award, and was staged by the National Theatre. His subsequent publications
include a poetry collection,
The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea
(2005).
His most recent novel is
The Red House
(2012).
MARY OLIVER
(1935– )
MARC FORSTER
The first thing I did after reading this poem for the first time was to stop. It was like I had been chasing after something and suddenly I just stopped and looked around me. I
stopped inside and my mind became peaceful and clear. We don’t know what it means to let go. It is very hard to discover
that nothing is permanent and we invent numerous beliefs to protect us
from the fear of letting go. We are frightened of letting go, because we have postponed it.
To find out what actually takes place when you let go, you must die. Not physically but psychologically, considering yourself dead to all things you have cherished, which is very hard for me. So
I started crying at the end of
the poem because of my love for life, humanity and stories. Those stories that someone has lived evoke a melancholy emotion of a time gone by. One that you
can’t hold on to and need to let go. But I believe that only through that act will my mind be free and able to truly experience what true freedom is.
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your
bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
(1984)
The Swiss-German filmmaker and screenwriter Marc Forster (b. 1969) directed
Monster’s Ball
(2001),
Finding Neverland
(2004),
Stay
(2005),
Stranger
Than Fiction
(2006),
The Kite Runner
(2007) and the twenty-second James Bond
film
Quantum of Solace
(2008). His most recent film is
World War Z
(2013), starring Brad Pitt.
Forster has also worked with the Red Cross and the Swiss federal health department’s HIV prevention campaign.
DEREK WALCOTT
(1930– )
TOM HIDDLESTON
I read this poem often, once a month at least. In the madness and mayhem of modern life, where every man seems committed to an endless search for the approval and esteem of his
fellows and peers, no matter what the cost, this poem reminds me of a basic truth: that we are, as we are, ‘enough’. Most
of us are motivated deep down by a sense of insufficiency, a
need to be better, stronger, faster; to work harder; to be more committed, more kind, more self-sufficient, more successful. We are driven by a sense that we are not, as we are,
‘enough’.
But this short poem by Derek Walcott is like a declaration of unconditional love. It’s like the embrace of an old friend. We are each of us
whole, perfectly imperfect,
enough
.
‘Feast on your life’ feels like permission, as though Walcott is calling time on all the madness, the mayhem, the insecurity, the neuroses, the drama, and with a big, broad, kind smile,
he brings us to an awareness of the present moment, calm and peaceful, and to a feeling of gratitude for everything that we have. I read it to my dearest friends after dinner
once, and to my family
at Christmas, and they started crying. Which always, unfailingly, makes me cry.
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger
who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
(c. 1984)
The screen roles of Tom Hiddleston (b. 1981) range from F. Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen’s
Midnight in Paris
(2011) to Henry V in the BBC TV Shakespeare series
The Hollow Crown
(2012), Adam in Jim Jarmusch’s
Only Lovers Left Alive
(2013) and the supervillain Loki in Marvel’s
Thor
(2011) and
The Avengers
(2012). He
has also appeared in
Archipelago
(2010),
War Horse
(2011) and
The Deep Blue Sea
(2011). His stage work includes
Coriolanus
and
Othello
at the Donmar Warehouse and
Ivanov
(West End)
.
and our faces, my heart, brief as photos
JOHN BERGER
(1926– )
SIMON MCBURNEY
Love joins. Love’s opposite is separation. And death separates eternally. It is an unbridgeable gap that we constantly yearn to close as we pledge to love eternally.
‘. . . So long lives this and this gives life to thee.’
My father was an archaeologist.
He knew about bridging gaps. There were bones he dug which were more fragile than the earth that surrounded them. Shards of flint were reassembled to reveal the
hands that knapped them. He uncovered, analysed, and reassembled artefacts, suggesting conjunctions that revealed a truth about our past and joined us with it. This is what John Berger does. He
also joins. His tools are words. And in his
exquisite book
and our faces, my heart, brief as photos,
he uses these tools to dig like an archaeologist, distil like a chemist, theorise like a
cosmologist, excavating in the earth of vulnerable human experience, and then joining the fragments he uncovers with an eye as sure as an astronomer and a hand as gentle as a carpenter. And in this
poem, written in prose, he does something extraordinary.
He joins love and its enemy separation. He makes, he constructs, a promise. A promise that is, perhaps, indistinguishable
from the promise of poetry itself. A promise, as Berger puts it ‘. . . that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried
out.’