Late Night Poetry

I'm back home in Galway for Christmas, so I met up with some of my friends for a little game of football yesterday evening.
It has been so long since I touched a ball or did any other type of exercise that I finished the game absolutely exhausted (I'm sure there will be plenty of new resolutions after Christmas).

My chest was pretty bad before I played the game. Last night in bed, it felt like there was an elephant sitting on it. Though physically drained, I still couldn't sleep, and I flicked through a couple of different books to try and fill my head with something else besides the ticking of the clock.

After failing to really get into the first book that I had managed to reach without leaving the blankets or disturbing the elephant, I looked around for something else to read and spied the little white spine of a book winking out at me from under a pile of papers on the sink beside my bed.

It read "I am the Darker brother", and after I had freed it from the papers, spilling a glass of water on the ground and knocking over my alarm clock in the process, I opened it up. It turned out to be an anthology of poems by Black American writers. Who knows how it had ended up there. Most of the poems had been written around the mid 20th century. There was some really good stuff in it too, not that I'm normally a big reader of poetry, and it helped pass a couple of sleepless hours until eventually my mind lost the will to fight my body anymore and let me drop off to slumber land. Anyhow, here's a couple I liked (amongst several):

Hokku: In the Falling Snow

In the falling snow
A laughing boy holds out his palms
Until they are white

Richard Wright (pictured above)

The Whipping

The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighbourhood
her goodness and his wrongs

Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
pleads in dusty zinnias
while she in spite of crippling fat
pursues and corners him.

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling
boy till the stick breaks
in her hand. His tears are rainy weather
to woundlike memories:

My head gripped in bony vise
of knees, the writhing struggle
to wrench free, the blows, the fear
worse than blows that hateful

Words could bring, the face that I
no longer knew or loved . . .
Well, it is over now, it is over,
and the boy sobs in his room,

And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged-
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.

Robert Hayden