The Lovers of the Poor by Gwendolyn Brooks

The Lovers of the Poor 

 

arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League

Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting   

In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag

Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting   

Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,

The pink paint on the innocence of fear;   

Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.

Cutting with knives served by their softest care,   

Served by their love, so barbarously fair.

Whose mothers taught: You’d better not be cruel!   

You had better not throw stones upon the wrens!   

Herein they kiss and coddle and assault   

Anew and dearly in the innocence   

With which they baffle nature. Who are full,   

Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all   

Sweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit,   

Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt   

Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise.   

To resurrect. To moisten with milky chill.   

To be a random hitching-post or plush.

To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.

                        Their guild is giving money to the poor.

The worthy poor. The very very worthy

And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?

perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim   

Nor—passionate. In truth, what they could wish

Is—something less than derelict or dull.

Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze!

God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold!   

The noxious needy ones whose battle’s bald   

Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.

                        But it’s all so bad! and entirely too much for them.

The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,

Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains,

The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they’re told,

Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn

Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs.   

The soil that looks the soil of centuries.

And for that matter the general oldness. Old   

Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old.

Not homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe.

Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic,

There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no   

Unkillable infirmity of such

A tasteful turn as lately they have left,   

Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars   

Must presently restore them. When they’re done

With dullards and distortions of this fistic

Patience of the poor and put-upon.

                        They’ve never seen such a make-do-ness as   

Newspaper rugs before! In this, this “flat,”   

Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich   

Rugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered. . . .)   

Readies to spread clean rugs for afternoon.   

Here is a scene for you. The Ladies look,   

In horror, behind a substantial citizeness   

Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart.   

Who, arms akimbo, almost fills a door.

All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor   

And tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft-

Eyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt.

                        Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost.   

But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put   

Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers   

Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems . . .

                        They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra,   

Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks,   

Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin “hangings,”   

Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter   

In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend,   

When suitable, the nice Art Institute;

Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter   

On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind.   

Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre   

With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings   

Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers   

So old old, what shall flatter the desolate?   

Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling

And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage   

Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames   

And, again, the porridges of the underslung

And children children children. Heavens! That

Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long

And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies’   

Betterment League agree it will be better

To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies,

To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring

Bells elsetime, better presently to cater

To no more Possibilities, to get

Away. Perhaps the money can be posted.

Perhaps they two may choose another Slum!

Some serious sooty half-unhappy home!—

Where loathe-love likelier may be invested.

                        Keeping their scented bodies in the center   

Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,   

They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,

Are off at what they manage of a canter,

And, resuming all the clues of what they were,

Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.

 

Today by Matthew Zapruder

Today

 

Justice Kennedy retired

farewell pious blowhard

from the dark collective

grief of half of us I stole

one long hour to think

despair is a privilege

we can’t afford but really

a few of us totally can

which is of course precisely

what creates the vacuum

this continual impervious

self-satisfied classic righteous

American malice can gleefully

pour into to crush

everything especially

our clever laments

today all my rich white

friends are talking again

about leaving for houses

they have not yet decided

to purchase over the border

it’s grotesque yet I too

admit when we finally

realized our son who

remembers every song

would not speak like

all the others

moving deeper into

places we could not go

we without hesitation

in fear with our money

went over whatever

we thought separated us

from a solution to this

and also other problems

most don’t even get to name

today in my hybrid

I too see the blue tarps

under the freeway as I drive

him to another appointment

he has the softest skin

and is never frantic

he loves when the trucks get

so dangerously close

and sings the same song

I taught him years ago

when I was in despair

about how to be happy

it’s been so much better

but still I walk around

as if something that cannot

fail protects everything I need

and only now can I ask

what dream was I born into

and what will happen

when the dreamer wakes

To You by Frank O'Hara

To You

 

What is more beautiful than night

and someone in your arms

that’s what we love about art

it seems to prefer us and stays

 

if the moon or a gasping candle

sheds a little light or even dark

you become a landscape in a landscape

with rocks and craggy mountains

 

and valleys full of sweaty ferns

breathing and lifting into the clouds

which have actually come low

as a blanket of aspirations’ blue

 

for once not a melancholy color

because it is looking back at us

there’s no need for vistas we are one

in the complicated foreground of space

 

the architects are most courageous

because it stands for all to see

and for a long long time just as

the words “I’ll always love you”

 

impulsively appear in the dark sky

and we are happy and stick by them

like a couple of painters in neon allowing

the light to glow there over the river

Search for the New Land by Morgan Parker

Search for the New Land

 

The future is not a gender, doesn’t even have a body.

And then there’s white women

making T-shirts and selling them for eighty dollars or whatever.

Whatever they do.

The sun doesn’t hate anyone and neither do I.

All I listen to is Lee Morgan’s trumpet

for long stretches of afternoons and nights in the desert.

I decide on the delusion where I live,

genderless and out of sight. This is how I choose

to spend what I have. I’m an American,

so I hear only what I want to.

This is our right—

to protect ourselves in times of extreme stress.

In times of great fear,

we do what we have to do to survive.

Our task is to make it out alive.

This one instruction for having a body,

the punishment for it.

I see the way birds look at me—

Endangered. The future is only earned

or inherited. It writes itself.

Everything wrong with the picture

is the true meaning of the picture.

The future is relative—of course

I am conditional. I am writing this from the deep end.

There are some privileges to being feared,

fearing the consequences of yourself.

How I came all this way and all these centuries,

carrying this extreme stress and pervading American fear.

The taxi driver deposited my many suitcases

into the busy street and drove off.

I don’t have enough hands. My evolution

has not equipped me for this climate.

Lifting a box of books into the overhead compartment,

I wished for a device to make my face a white girl

in times like these, helpless with a body. No full flight

would watch a white girl struggle this way,

her life flashing before her

under the weight of her own books.

I can’t even imagine it. The dissonance of chords

and notes, the hilarious idea of infinity.

The last time I considered suicide—on the edge

of a curb, leaning into the yellow taxis of

the Meatpacking, which in retrospect would have been

a terrible place to die, in front of all those white women

hobbling in their high heels over the cobblestone,

doing that shampoo commercial move,

bathed in the light of themselves—I considered

all I’ve learned about sacrifice, and duty.

I went home in an American SUV, ashamed of something.

That last time I teased death, I couldn’t

listen to any music for weeks, not one note of song.

 

When I think of the story of Abraham

tying up his son for slaughter—the offering

on an altar at the edge of a mountaintop,

the instruction to do what he had to do, as it is written—

I identify most with the ram. The alternative

asymmetrical sacrifice. I see the way

birds look at me—it writes itself.

We used to sing that song, Father Abraham

had many sons, I am one of them

and so are you, praising the lord and fearing

the wind in our palm trees. The future is this awe:

looking up at the sky in California. Blue in Green.

I am always at the edge of the end of the world.

In the desert, if a ram appears, I may escape death.

Eighty dollars for a certain and secure future.

Miles Davis’s trumpet on “Blue in Green”—a future

where I no longer need to be grateful.

Baldwin wrote, “Our crown has already been bought

and paid for.” What’s important in these times of

war and faith is the consideration, the lean into traffic,

the ax raised dutifully. You are always almost gone—

it is written so that we may remember.

Documentation of the past makes the future possible.

I am learning all I can from this day so I can teach it

to who I will be tomorrow. I have written

I am a different person every minute, and everybody knows

I don’t believe in time, anyway. I did not inherit it.

I always misremember the title Search for the New Land,

the Lee Morgan album and the book by Julius Lester.

I misremember the THE. I think: a new land.

A—all I can hear is go. Wherever, anywhere but here.

In Julius Lester’s Search for the New Land, it is written,

“Being. To be. In America one was taught TO DO.”

My task is to wander until I find a safe place

to continue being. I think: effort, and sacrifice,

and faith—fingers crossed.

I think: it is my responsibility to find

the ram to slaughter in my place.

If we hate the past more than we love the future,

Julius Lester wrote, we will succeed in bringing that past

into the future. Documentation of the past

makes all futures possible, makes the Land New.

The the: it is written. The difference between surviving

and Being. The future is—

take it. The future is out of body,

out of sight, certain as the the.

Looking up at the sky in California.

The trumpet again and again—

wind, blue, one holy bird and everything

possible and promised. The New Land

already waiting for me. Even me.

 

Wisteria by Philip Levine

Wisteria

 

The first purple wisteria

I recall from boyhood hung

on a wire outside the windows

of the breakfast room next door

at the home of Steve Pisaris.

I loved his tall, skinny daughter,

or so I thought, and I would wait

beside the back door, prostrate,

begging to be taken in. Perhaps

it was only the flowers of spring

with their sickening perfumes

that had infected me. When Steve

and Sophie and the three children

packed up and made the move west,

I went on spring after spring,

leaden with desire, half-asleep,

praying to die. Now I know

those prayers were answered.

That boy died, the brick houses

deepened and darkened with rain,

age, use, and finally closed

their eyes and dreamed the sleep

of California. I learned this

only today. Wakened early

in an empty house not lately

battered by storms, I looked

for nothing. On the surface

of the rain barrel, the paled,

shredded blossoms floated.

 

Professional Spanish Knocks on the Door by Elisabet Velasquez

Professional Spanish Knocks on the Door

 

At first we don’t answer. 

Knocks that loud usually mean 5-0 is on the other end.

 

                                 Señora ábrenos la puerta porfavor.

                                 Estamos aquí para platicar con usted.

                                 No queremos llamar la policía.

 

The person on the other side of the door

is speaking professional Spanish.

 

Professional Spanish is fake friendly.

Is a warning.

 

Is a downpour when you

Just spent your last twenty dollars on a wash and set.

 

Is the kind of Spanish that comes

to take things away from you.

 

The kind of Spanish that looks at your Spanish like it needs help.

Professional Spanish of course doesn’t offer help.

 

It just wants you to know that it knows you need some.

Professional Spanish is stuck up

 

like most people from the hood who get good jobs.

Professional Spanish is all like I did it you can do it too.

 

Professional Spanish thinks it gets treated better than us

because it knows how to follow the rules.

 

Because it says Abrigo instead of Có.

Because it knows which fork belongs to the salad

 

and which spoon goes in the coffee.

 

Because it gets to be the anchor on Telemundo and Univision

and we get to be the news that plays behind its head in the background.

 

The Bluet by James Schuyler

The Bluet 

 

And is it stamina

that unseasonably freaks

forth a bluet, a

Quaker lady, by

the lake? So small, 

a drop of sky that

splashed and held,

four-petaled, creamy

in its throat. The woods

around were brown

the air crisp as a

Carr’s table water

biscuit and smelt of

cider. There were frost

apples on the trees in 

the field below the house.

The pond was still, then

broke into a ripple.

The hills, the leaves that

have not yet fallen 

are deep and oriental

rug colors. Brown leaves

in the woods set off

gray trunks of trees.

But that bluet was 

the focus of it all: last

spring, next spring, what

does it matter? Unexpected

as a tear when someone

reads a poem you wrote 

for him: “It’s this line

here.” That bluet breaks

me up, tiny spring flower

late, late in dour October.