Poem 22 - To a Sad Daughter

To me, this poem is all about one line: “If you break[,] break going out not in.” I love advice poems, especially advice poems for one’s children. But this line is the best parent-to-child advice I’ve come across. If you break, break while you’ve giving. If you break, break while you’re in the world, not in yourself.

Michael Ondaatje is the author of The English Patient and other works of fiction.

To a Sad Daughter

Michael Ondaatje

All night long the hockey pictures

gaze down at you

sleeping in your tracksuit.

Belligerent goalies are your ideal.

Threats of being traded

cuts and wounds

—all this pleases you.

O my god! you say at breakfast

reading the sports page over the Alpen

as another player breaks his ankle

or assaults the coach.

 

When I thought of daughters

I wasn’t expecting this

but I like this more.

I like all your faults

even your purple moods

when you retreat from everyone

to sit in bed under a quilt.

And when I say ‘like’

I mean of course ‘love’

but that embarrasses you.

You who feel superior to black and white movies

(coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)

though you were moved

by Creature from the Black Lagoon.

 

One day I’ll come swimming

beside your ship or someone will

and if you hear the siren

listen to it. For if you close your ears

only nothing happens. You will never change.

 

I don’t care if you risk

your life to angry goalies

creatures with webbed feet.

You can enter their caves and castles

their glass laboratories. Just

don’t be fooled by anyone but yourself.

 

This is the first lecture I’ve given you.

You’re ‘sweet sixteen’ you said.

I’d rather be your closest friend

than your father. I’m not good at advice

you know that, but ride

the ceremonies

until they grow dark.

 

Sometimes you are so busy

discovering your friends

I ache with a loss

—but that is greed.

And sometimes I’ve gone

into my purple world

and lost you.

 

One afternoon I stepped

into your room. You were sitting

at the desk where I now write this.

Forsythia outside the window

and sun spilled over you

like a thick yellow miracle

as if another planet

was coaxing you out of the house

—all those possible worlds!—

and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.

 

I cannot look at forsythia now

without loss, or joy of you.

You step delicately

into the wild world

and your real prize will be

the frantic search.

Want everything. If you break

break going out not in.

How you live your life I don’t care

but I’ll sell my arm for you,

hold your secrets for ever.

 

If I speak of death

which you fear now, greatly,

it is without answers

except that each

one we know is

in our blood.

Don’t recall graves.

Memory is permanent.

Remember the afternoon’s

yellow suburban annunciation.

Your goalie

in his frightening mask

dreams perhaps

of gentleness.

Poem 21 - In a U-Haul North of Damascus

Here’s a poem about pain and the possibility of redemption. On the road to Damascus, of course, is where the persecutor of Christians, Saul, was blinded, given a faith in Christ, and rose redeemed as Paul, the pillar of the first church. Damascus, here, refers to Damascus, Georgia, population 254, the place where our poet (or his character) ponders the chance of a new beginning.

In a U-Haul North of Damascus

David Bottoms

1

Lord, what are the sins

I have tried to leave behind me? The bad checks,

the workless days, the scotch bottles thrown across the

fence

and into the woods, the cruelty of silence,

the cruelty of lies, the jealousy,

the indifference?

What are those on the scale of sin

or failure

that they should follow me through the streets of

                Columbus,

the moon-streaked fields between Benevolence

and Cuthbert where dwarfed cotton sparkles like pearls

on the shoulders of the road. What are these

that they should find me half-lost,

sick and sleepless

behind the wheel of this U-Haul truck parked in a field

                on Georgia 45

a few miles north of Damascus,

some makeshift rest stop for eighteen wheelers

where the long white arms of oaks slap across the trailers

and headlights glare all night through a wall of pines?

2

What was I thinking, Lord?

That for once I’d be in the driver’s seat, a firm grip on

                direction?

So the jon boat muscled up the ramp,

the Johnson outboard, the bent frame of the wrecked

                Harley

chained for so long to the back fence,

the scarred desk, the bookcases and books,

the mattress and box springs,

a broken turntable, a Pioneer amp, a pair

of three-way speakers, everything mine

I intended to keep. Everything else abandon.

But on the road from one state

to another, what is left behind nags back through

                distance,

a last word rising to a scream, a salad bowl

shattering against a kitchen cabinet, china barbs

spiking my heal, blood trailed across the cream linoleum

like the bedsheet that morning long ago

just before I watched the future miscarried.

Jesus, could the irony be

that suffering forms a stronger bond than love?

3

Now the sun

streaks the windshield with yellow and orange, heavy

                beads

of light drawing highways in the dew-cover.

I roll down the window and breathe the pine-air,

the after-scent of rain, and the far-off smell

of asphalt and diesel fumes.

But mostly pine and rain

as though the world really could be clean again.

Somewhere behind me,

miles behind me on a two-lane that streaks across

west Georgia, light is falling

through the windows of my half-empty house.

Lord, why am I thinking about this? And why should I

                care

so long after everything has fallen

to pain that the woman sleeping there should be sleeping

alone?

Could I be just another sinner who needs to be blinded

before I can see? Lord, is it possible to fall

toward grace? Could I be moved

to believe in new beginnings? Could I be moved?

Poem 20 - Do Not Expect...

Here’s a pessimistic little autumn poem about the way we do and don’t get our answers in life. If you’re having a bad day, shuffling through ankle-deep leaves in your backyard, feeling winter settle into you bones, trying to let go of summer gracefully, trying to be truthful and thankful, and trying to feel whole until you are whole, then this is your poem.

Do Not Expect...

Dana Gioia

Do not expect that if your book falls open

to a certain page, that any phrase

you read will make a difference today,

or that the voices you might overhear

when the wind moves through the yellow-green

and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the

dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon

your shadow walks beside you on the wall,

and the days stay long and heavy underneath

the distant rumor of the harvest. One

more summer gone,

and one way or another you survive,

dull or regretful, never learning that

nothing is hidden in the obvious

changes of the world, that even the dim

reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass

is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then

you touch, you see, you press against

the surface of impenetrable things.

Poem 19 - Eating Alone

This is a nice transition-to-fall poem by one of the best poets of the day. It’s the perfect poem for this time of year, the cooler days, the crisp fallen leaves, the hunkering-down feelings as we turn the bend toward winter. I love how this poem celebrates the careful loneliness of eating the last of the summer’s bounty alone.

Eating Alone

Li-Young Lee

I’ve pulled the last of the year’s young onions.

The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,

brown and old. What is left of the day flames

in the maples at the corner of my

eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.

By the cellar door, I wash the onions,

then drink from the icy metal spigot.

Once, years back, I walked beside my father

among the windfall pears. I can’t recall

our words. We may have strolled in silence. But

I still see him bend that way—left hand braced

on knee, creaky—to lift and hold to my

eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet

spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.

It was my father I saw this morning

waving to me from the trees. I almost

called to him, until I came close enough

to see the shovel, leaning where I had

left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas

fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame

oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.

What more could I, a young man, want.