September 20: Owed Poem, Philip Levine, "Among Children"

I owe you guys and gals a poem.  Thursday night, I was busy cleaning and packing and being tired.  This afternoon has been a little lazier for me.  I'm done with most of my work, and I've just spent an hour looking at online speculation about who will win the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature.  (Surprisingly, I do not appear on any of the lists of potential winners.)  Now I'm getting ready to head out to church for Saturday evening mass.

The poem I've chosen to share is a meditation on children and desperation and the future.  It's heartbreakingly beautiful.  A poem about the cycle of poverty that exists in many of the industrial cities in the state of Michigan.

It makes Saint Marty want to hug his kids.

Among Children

by:  Philip Levine

I walk among the rows of bowed heads--
the children are sleeping through fourth grade
so as to be ready for what is ahead,
the monumental boredom of junior high
and the rush forward tearing their wings
loose and turning their eyes forever inward.
These are the children of Flint, their fathers
work at the spark plug factory or truck
bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs
to the widows of the suburbs. You can see
already how their backs have thickened,
how their small hands, soiled by pig iron,
leap and stutter even in dreams. I would like
to sit down among them and read slowly
from The Book of Job until the windows
pale and the teacher rises out of a milky sea
of industrial scum, her gowns streaming
with light, her foolish words transformed
into song, I would like to arm each one
with a quiver of arrows so that they might
rush like wind there where no battle rages
shouting among the trumpets, Hal Ha!
How dear the gift of laughter in the face
of the 8 hour day, the cold winter mornings
without coffee and oranges, the long lines
of mothers in old coats waiting silently
where the gates have closed. Ten years ago
I went among these same children, just born,
in the bright ward of the Sacred Heart and leaned
down to hear their breaths delivered that day,
burning with joy. There was such wonder
in their sleep, such purpose in their eyes
dosed against autumn, in their damp heads
blurred with the hair of ponds, and not one
turned against me or the light, not one
said, I am sick, I am tired, I will go home,
not one complained or drifted alone,
unloved, on the hardest day of their lives.
Eleven years from now they will become
the men and women of Flint or Paradise,
the majors of a minor town, and I
will be gone into smoke or memory,
so I bow to them here and whisper
all I know, all I will never know.

Can't say more than this