Sometimes the job of a poet is to speak truths that other people don’t want to hear or are afraid to voice. That’s why poets in Russia were shipped off to gulags—because they refused to be silent in the face of injustice and genocide. It would be very easy to simply write about pretty trees or pretty snowstorms or pretty sunsets over churches.
Some jobs are simply harder and more dangerous than others.
Sharon Olds brags about the hard job of giving birth . . .
The Language of the Brag
by: Sharon Olds
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the center of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.
I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.
I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around
my belly big with cowardice and safely,
stool charcoal from iron pills,
huge breasts leaking colostrum,
legs swelling, hands swelling,
face swelling and reddening, hair
falling out, inner sex
stabbed again and again with terrible pain like a knife.
I have lain down.
I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and shit and water and
slowly alone in the centre of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.
I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.
Sharon Olds has a lot to brag about. I’ve watched my wife give birth twice—once naturally and once by Caesarean section. Having a baby is, to put it bluntly, fucking hard work. Painful. Bloody. Terrifying. Beautiful. All of those things. And women have been performing this labor since Homo sapiens first appeared on the scene about 300,000 years ago, longer if you count the time we were in full 2001: A Space Odyssey Dawn of Man mode.
Yet, for reasons I don’t understand, men have been running things for a very long time, fucking up this planet and its inhabitants. (Climate change, table for one.) I, for one, would be very comfortable if the world was run by women. Men are just too preoccupied with power and wealth and violence. In all of the jobs I’ve ever had, my direct supervisors were all women, and I never felt demeaned or taken advantage of. Quite the contrary. These women have always treated me with respect and kindness.
Don’t get wrong. I don’t think ALL men are lazy misogynists. In fact, most guys I know respect and value the women in their lives, just like me. I’ve never been accused of being lazy. I’m a hard worker. If I find myself simply sitting on the couch at 9 p.m., not doing anything, I experience a strain of guilt usually reserved for the Catholic confessional. I don’t like wasting time, ever. If I’m awake and fairly cogent, I try to get something accomplished, whether it’s grading papers, writing a poem, and typing a blog post.
This afternoon, I performed at a poetry reading. Now, lots of people don’t think reading poetry in front of a group is work. I mean, all I’m doing is making a few jokes, telling a few stories, and reciting a few poems. However, most poets I know are introverts. Interacting with people can be exhausting for normal individuals. For introverts, it’s debilitating. (I’m an introvert, despite teaching college composition and hosting library events all the time.).
But I’ve grown accustomed to the hard work of not being an introvert, and I’m a pretty content individual.
Saint Marty wrote a poem for this evening about being a hard worker in the land of the free (for now), based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:
In honor of Seamus Heaney’s birthday (b. 1939), write a poem about your native land, providing historical details without being overtly political. Instead, focus on personal details about, for instance, what your parents and/or grandparents did for a living. Be present in your poem, and don’t shy away from unlikely (“ordinary”) poetic subjects, such as digging in the dirt, farming, baking, or cleaning the house.
Old Glory
by: Martin Achatz
My dad flew the flag every day
of his life, unfurled it like a prayer
every morning, folded, brought it
inside every evening when darkness
turned red, white, and blue into
oxblood, parchment, and midnight.
He grew up on a farm before moving
to Detroit, and I imagine him
doing chores in the barn, pitching
hay, shoveling manure, picking
corn off stalks under punishing
July and August sun, his face
and arms burning to umber,
almost the same hue as the soil
in the Upper Peninsula mining town
where I cut my teeth as a kid,
blasts from the Tilden rattling
dishes, windows daily, hematite
fogs sometimes turning each breath
into bloody bites of air. I didn’t
follow my father’s boot tracks,
traded wrench and copper pipe
for fountain pen and journal,
the hard work of water heaters,
sewers, furnaces for the hard
work of syllables, lines, stanzas.
My dad and I didn’t see
eye-to-eye on a lot of things,
but, Jesus, he broke his back for us.
Every morning, after raising
Old Glory, he climbed behind
the wheel of his work truck,
disappeared into the bright light
of a new day as the colors slapped
and chewed the sky to pieces.
