Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (32 page)

Wuer Kaixi (b. 1968) was the Chinese student of Uyghur ethnicity who led the human rights protests
in Tiananmen Square in 1989. After publicly confronting Premier Li Peng on
national television, he was put on China’s ‘most wanted’ list and fled through Hong Kong to France and the United States, where he studied at Harvard University. He now lives in
Taiwan, where he works as a political commentator, and continues his endeavours for freedom in China.

SEAMUS HEANEY
(1939–2013)

RICHARD CURTIS

As my father grew older, I noticed that he rarely came close to shedding tears about the sad and serious things in our lives. But if ever telling a tale of something good, some
gracious or loving piece of behaviour, tears would always come into his eyes. And I feel myself going that way as I too get older.
Sadness somehow I expect. Kindness and love take me by surprise.
So I love this poem with its bold and unexpected simple statement of love in the final line.

It also moves me because I have always presumed it is a poem about a friend – and I have failed my friends, mainly, and failed to fulfil the potential of my friendships, allowing the other
big things in my life to edge them out. So
it’s also very much a poem about my life – and the fact that the author almost says I love you, but doesn’t – well, there’s
the sadness in it, after all . . .

The screenwriter and director Richard Curtis (b. 1956) is best known for such romantic
comedy films as
Four Weddings and a Funeral
(1994),
Notting Hill
(1999),
Bridget Jones’s Diary
(2001),
Love Actually
(2003) and
About Time
(2013), as well as the TV series
Blackadder
and
Mr. Bean.
He is also the cofounder of the
British charity Comic Relief.

ADRIENNE RICH
(1929–2012)

ANISH KAPOOR

This poem describes the atrocities of war from the position of an American girl who remains ‘ignorantly Jewish’. Rich tangles the reader between identification and
innocence, and suggests that memory, even our sense of humanity, can be confused by trauma, ‘Memory says: want to do
right? Don’t count on me.’ Reading this poem jogs a sense of
the indirect guilt we feel when we are faced with the plight of humanity and our own inability or unwillingness to act. In an extraordinary political description of empathy and compassion, Rich
imagines ‘I’m a field with corners left for the landless.’

We are called to stand alongside the poet and dream of ‘world revolution’,
and invited to ‘stand on the road to Ramallah with naked face.’ The incantation
‘I’m a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin’ makes me and my body the field of action. I can’t read these lines without tears in my eyes. What do I sell when
‘I’m the woman who sells for a boat ticket’, when ‘I’m a woman bargaining for a chicken’? The fragility of the individual is present as victim and perpetrator
– what is right and wrong in the midst of desperation, when ‘I’m accused of child – death’? Rich makes us fully present – ‘I am standing here in your
poem’. Each one of us is not innocent but ‘unsatisfied / lifting
my smoky mirror’. This most political of poems is deeply intimate and gives us no escape
from the humanity of suffering and loss.

The Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor (b. 1954) represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale and won the Turner Prize the following year. His work is now represented
in major collections all over the
world. Major public works include
Cloud Gate
in Chicago’s Millennium Park,
Sky Mirror
(New York 2006, London 2010),
Orbit
(2012 London
Olympic Games) and a granite monument in New York’s Hanover Square to commemorate the British victims of 11 September 2001.

HAROLD PINTER
(1930–2008)

NEIL LABUTE

When you think of ‘warm and fuzzy’, I can’t imagine that Harold Pinter would be the first writer to come to mind (and I don’t suppose that I would be in
the top ten, either), but that might’ve been before reading a few of the poems he wrote to his beloved Antonia Fraser.

In his lovely and
deceptively simple verses that make up ‘It Is Here (for A)’, Pinter reveals yearning, fear and desire in a way that would make his more romantic predecessors tear
up and blubber away (if you can read the line ‘it was the breath we took when we first met’ without your eyes misting over, then you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din).

I admire the strength, the muscle, the menace of Pinter’s
language in his plays and screenplays but a poem like this – written as a memory about the time when he and Lady Antonia
first met (and her own favourite poem of his) – makes me love him as the very human creature that he was. Flawed, brilliant, irascible, but gifted with a huge and feeling heart.

This poem makes me cry and makes me want to be a better man – it also moves me for very special
reasons as well, and that is all you can ever ask of a few words artfully arranged on an
empty slip of paper.