Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (35 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
J. J. Abrams (b. 1966) is the director of the feature films
Mission: Impossible III
(2006),
Star Trek
(2009),
Super 8
(2011), which he also wrote, and
Star Trek Into Darkness
(2013). His next film as a director
will be
Star Wars: Episode VII
. Founder and president of Bad Robot Productions, Abrams also produced
the films
Cloverfield
(2008) and
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
(2011). His television credits as producer and/or creator include
Felicity
,
Alias
,
Lost
,
Fringe
,
Person of Interest
and
Revolution
.
EMILY ZINNEMANN
(1984– )
COLIN FIRTH
Emily Zinnemann graduated from the University of Toronto and received an MFA from the University of Michigan. I heard this poem at a public reading she gave at the University
of Michigan in 2009.
I’m reluctant to talk across this poem; I think it says itself
perfectly. It offers sparse, beautiful fragments of memory, and then seems simultaneously to take them away. The unpunctuated
ending – as if she’s just walked away altogether.
Regarding the Home of One’s Childhood, One Could:
forget the plum tree;
forget its black-skinned plums;
also the weight
of their leaning as they leaned
over starry hedges;
also the hedges,
the dew that turned them starry;
the wet-bellied pups who slunk there
trailing ludicrous pedigrees;
even the eyes
of birds
glittering
in the branches;
even the branches
Colin Firth (b. 1960) won an Academy Award in 2011 for his portrayal of King George VI in
The King’s Speech
. After coming to prominence as Mr Darcy in a BBC
adaptation of
Pride and Prejudice
(1995)
,
he has starred in such films as the
Bridget Jones’s Diary
series,
A Single Man
(2009) and
Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy
(2011).
CRAIG RAINE
(1944– )
RICHARD ROGERS
A month after the sudden death of our son, Bo, we went to Venice on the weekend of what would have been his twenty-eighth birthday. It is a city we love and know well –
we had often gone with our children for summer holidays, and in fact we had just been a few months previously with Bo.
We also chose Venice as we had no friends there and we craved a quiet time
together.
What we were unprepared for was how the sad winter light and wet weather of the city reflected our mood, and how comforting that was to us. The summer San Marco full of joy, where we would sit
with our ice creams or Camparis in the Caffè Florian, was now empty, the hot sun replaced by light rain and grey
skies, with wooden walkways ready to take people as the waters rose.
Our time was spent only with each other until the afternoon we met our friend Craig Raine, the poet, and his wife, Ann Pasternak Slater. The four of us sought refuge in the Caffè Quadri
and over hot chocolate we talked of Venice and of Bo. A few weeks later Craig sent us this poem – a poem that makes me cry.
For Ruthie Rogers in Venice
Shoulders to cry on,
these mooring posts,
trios leaning together,
supporting each other:
in grief and inconsolable.
Mooring posts tapering to blunt black
like a child’s lost crayons
The endless wash
of salt water
See-through, threadbare, worn,
These great fogs like ghosts
in slow flight from some slaughter.
The hoarse cries of fog-horns,
lost in their loss,
with no way back,
and the world gone white
in a single night.
(2012)
Richard Rogers (b. 1933) is the 2007 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate and the recipient of the 1985 RIBA Gold Medal. He was knighted in 1991
and made a life peer in 1996.
His practice, Rogers
Stirk Harbour + Partners, is best known for such pioneering buildings as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the headquarters for Lloyd’s of London
and Terminal 4 at the Madrid–Barajas Airport. His wife Ruth, to whom the poem is addressed, is the chef and food writer who founded London’s River Café.
ROBIN ROBERTSON
(1955– )
MOHSIN HAMID
I don’t go looking for poems. I just find them. (Or they find me.) Like the time some fifteen years ago, sitting in a Manhattan subway car, I looked up and saw, as part
of a series called ‘Poetry in Motion’, lines about longing by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a poet from my native city of Lahore, and was
struck by a sense of, simultaneously, homesickness and being
at home.
Three years ago I found ‘Keys to the Doors’ in a copy of
The New York Review of Books
, mailed to my house in Lahore, and I cut it out and taped it to my printer. It’s
there now, stirring to the beat of my ceiling fan, as I write this.
I was a father then, am doubly so today, with a daughter coming up on five and
a son of two; but then I was a newer father, with a daughter just starting to chat. She’d stride into my room
while I was novel-writing, and talk to me, and ask me questions, and bring her fantasies into where I sat draped in mine.
And this poem, this poem for me is that.
Keys to the Doors
for Eilidh
I loved your age of wonder: your third
and fourth
and fifth years spent astonished, widening your eyes
at each new trick of the world – and me standing there,
solemnly explaining how it was done. The moon and stars,
rainbows, photographs, gravity, the birds in the air,
the difference between blood and water.
In true life?
you would say, looking up
and I would nod, like some broken-hearted
sage,
knowing there would be no answers soon
to all the big questions that were left, to cruelty and fear,
to age and grief and death, and no words either.
And you, like me, will sit and shake your head.
In true life?
Yes, my sweet, strong daughter, I’m afraid
there is all this as well, and this is it: true life.
(2012)
The novels by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid (b. 1971) are
Moth Smoke
(2000),
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
(2007, subsequently turned into a feature film
directed by Mira Nair) and
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
(2013).
NADINE GORDIMER
Pablo Neruda’s line: ‘Whoever discovers who I am will discover who you are.’ I am not a man, neither will be the many women who read and receive the
revelations of these poems. But in the lives of the great Neruda and other poets harvested here – whoever you are, man, woman or any other gender – you will discover in yourself
matchlessly conveyed the exultation
and devastation of human experience. No matter that of the almost a hundred poets chosen by various individuals, only a dozen are women. Neither gender nor the
historical era in which the poem was written makes out-of-date the emotions they divulge, even if the vocabulary, ‘thees’ and ‘thous’, is at times archaic. Passion of love
and loss, morality of ‘just war,’ the purposeful trajectory
of life and its frustrations have been, are, for always.