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ARTS AND CULTURE

Walt Whitman on Donald Trump

  • 03 September 2018

 

Selected poems

 

 

Dream, on a morning in the sacred month of OctoberFor Father Gabriel Rochelle

 

In the bardo,

huddled and waiting with others

after our life reviews,

each making ready for

 

our atonement, you entered

the vestibule to our right

bearing a large wooden cross.

Wordlessly, you spoke to me

 

to rise, and to follow; whereupon,

we walked into yet

another room — an anteroom,

which led outward, back into

 

the world, not as we know it, but

yet another world. This is when

the cross came apart

through your own ingenuity, and

 

broke cleanly through the middle,

lengthwise, to become two crosses,

of which you handed one

half for me to carry, and the other

 

half you lifted to bear

on your shoulder. Upon awaking,

I am now both cleansed

and challenged, given direction but

 

needing to reset my compass,

buoyed up but aware of the weight

of the new I will need to carry, as

I find my way from the vivid depths

 

of the dream on a morning

in the sacred month of October, as I

emerge toward a shimmering

of light breaking through the clouds.

 

 

The sunflowers

Their large heads loomed above me,

arrayed with their bright yellow petals.

 

Row after row of them arranged

in lines to the right side of the house

 

and adjacent to the garage in the back.

At nine, I looked up at their creaking

 

stalks on autumn days on my way to

and from school, and looked down

 

on their ranks from the glassed-in

porch of the second floor railroad flat

 

my father rented after my mother's

death. I was overcome by their yellow

 

brilliance and the size of their corollas,

which exceeded the diameter

 

of a human head. Our landlords were

an elderly Albanian couple who moved

 

slowly and spoke incoherently, as my

Polish father did, in broken English,

 

their red and white oilskin tablecloth

always graced with a small white bowl

 

of sunflower seeds for the enormous

caged parrot, who could swear in

 

impeccably explicit language. The bird

was menacing but obedient to its owners.

 

Although any visitor was treated

as a home invader. He would begin

 

by hissing, then moved into a barrage

of curses. The Albanians winnowed

 

the seeds from their crop after

deadheading the flowers, their kitchen

 

table having become a staging area

for putting up kernels. After the harvest,

 

deep in October, the plots

where the sunflowers loomed became

 

desolate with dried stalks the wind

blew through, with a sound whose tone

 

underscored the sereness of autumn.

I looked at the stark rows from

 

the glassed-in porch upstairs, where

I had been stung by a wasp, which made

 

my finger throb as if it had been hit

by a hammer, but the memory

 

of the glory of the sunflowers in bloom

continued to fill me, as do the rays

 

of sunlight that shone

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