Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
Then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking
When the rooms were warm, he'd call.
And slowly I would rise and dress,
Fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden
Back

Elegiac Stanza on a Photograph
Of Ethel Rosenburg in her Kitchen

It sits on top my desk, but it is faces
So that the sun will not cause it to fade.
The photographs we save are like the taste
Of hooney on a sharpened razor blade.
 
 
 

The Naming of Parts by Henry Reed

Today we have naming of parts.  Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning.  And tommorow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing.  But today,
Today we have naming of parts.  Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
        And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel.  And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings.  And This is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got.  The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
        Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb.  And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger.  You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb.  The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
        Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt.  The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see.  We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring.  And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
        They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the almond blossom
Silent in all of the gardens, and the bees going backwards and forwards,
        For today we have naming of parts.

In Bertram's Garden

Jane looks down at her organdy skirt
As if it somehow were the thing disgraced,
For being there, on the floor, in the dirt,
And she catches it up about her waist,
Smooths it out along one hip,
And pulls it over the crumpled slip.

On the porch, green-shuttered, cool,
Asleep is Bertram, that bronze boy,
Who, having wound her around a spool,
Sends her spinning like a toy
Out to the garden, all alone,
To sit and weep on a bench of stone.

Soon the purple dark will bruise
Lily and bleeding-heart and rose,
And the little Cupid loseó
Eyes and ears and chin and nose,
And Jane lie down with others soon
Naked to the naked moon.

Back

The Rural Carrier Stops to Kill a Nine-Foot Cottonmouth

Lord God, I saw the son-of a bitch uncoil
In the road ahead of me , uncoil and squirm
For the Ditch, squirm a hell of a long time.
Missed him with the car.  When I got back to him, he was all
But gone, nothing left on the road, but the tip end
Of his tail, and that disappearing into Johnson grass.
I leaned over the ditch and saw him, balled up now, hiss
I aimed for the mouth and shot him.  And shot him again.

Then I got a good strong stick and dragged him out.
He was long and evil, thick as the top of my arm.
There are things in this world a man can't look at without
Wanting to kill.  Don't ask me why.  I was calm
Enough, I thought.  But I felt my spine
Squirm, suddenly.  I admit it.  It was mine.

The Pardon
My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honeysuckle-vine.
I who had loved him while he kept alive

Went only close enough to where he was
To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell,
Twined with another odour heavier still
And hear the flies' intolerable buzz.

Well, I was ten and very much afraid.
In my kind world the dead were out of range
And I could not forgive the sad or strange
in beast or man.  My father took the spade

And buried him.  Last night I saw the grass
Slowly divide(it was the same scene
But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green)
And saw the dog emerging.  I confess

I felt afraid again, but still he came
In the carnal sun, clothed in a hymn of flies,
And death was breading in his lively eyes
I started in to cry and call his name,

Asking forgiveness of his tongueless head.
. . . I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death's pardon now.  And mourn the dead.
 

A Summer Morning

Her young employers having got in late
From seeing friends in town
and scraped the right front fender on the gate,
Will not, the cook expects, be coming down.

She makes a quiet breakfast for herself.
The coffee-pot is bright,
The jelly where is should be on the shelf.
She breaks an egg into the morning light,

Then, with the bread knife lifted, stands and hears
The sweet efficient sounds
Of thrush and catbird and the snip of shears
Where, in the terraced backward of the grounds,

A gardener works before the heat of day.
He straightens for a view
Of the big house ascending stony-gray
Out of his bed's mosaic with the dew.

His young employers having got in late,
He and the cook alone
Receive the morning on their old estate,
Possessing what the owners can but own.

Lying in a Hammock
at William Duffy's Farm
In Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the blank truck,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the raving behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkness and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

The First Days
The first thing I saw in the morning
Was a huge golden bee ploughing
His burly right shoulder into the belly
Of a sleek yellow pear
Low on a bough.
Before he could find that sudden black honey
That squirms around in there
Inside the seed, the tree could not bear any more.
The pear fell to the ground
With the bee still half alive
inside its body.
He would have died if I hadn't knelt down
And sliced the pear gently
A little more open.
The bee shuddered, and returned.
Maybe I should have left him alone there,
Drowning in his own delight.
The best days are the first
To flee, sang the lovely
Musician born in this town
So like my own.
I let the bee go
Among the gas works at the edge of Mantua.

Morning Swim

Into my empty head there come
A cotton beach, a dock wherefrom

I set out, oily and nude
Through mist , in chilly solitude.

There was no line, no roof or floor
To tell the water from the air.

Night fog thick as terry cloth
closed me in its fuzzy growth.

I hung my bathrobe on two pegs.
I took the lake between my legs.

Invaded and invader, I
went overhand on that flat sky.

Fish twitched beneath me, quick and tame
In their green zone they sang my name

and in the rhythm of the swim
I hummed a two-four-time slow hymn.

I hummed Abide with Me, the beat
rose in the fine thrash of my feet,

rose in the bubbles I put out
slantwise, tailing through my mouth.

My bones drank water, water fell
through all my doors.  I was the well

That fed the lake, that met my sea
In which I sang Abide with Me.