Poem Therapy 2:39 - November 30, 2001: First Things at the Last Minute - Robert Hass & The Hour Until We See You - Brenda Hillman

Poet Robert Hass

First Things At the Last Minute
Robert Hass

The white water rush of some warbler's song.
Last night, a few strewings of ransacked moonlight
On the sheets. You don't know what slumped forward
In the nineteen-forties taxi or why they blamed you
Or what the altered landscape, willowy, riparian,
Had to do with the reasons why everyone
Should be giving things away, quickly,
Except for spendthrift sorrow that can't bear
The need to be forgiven and keeps looking for something
To forgive. The motion of washing machines
Is called agitation. Object constancy is a term
Devised to indicate what a child requires
From days. Clean sheets are an example
Of something that, under many circumstances,
A person can control. The patterns moonlight makes
Are chancier, and dreams, well, dreams
Will have their way with you, their way
With you, will have their way.



The Hour Until We See You
Brenda Hillman

When we part, even for an hour,
you become the standing on the avenue
baffled one, under neon,
holding that huge
red book about the capital— ;

what will you be in the next hour,
— bundled to walk
through creamy coins from streetlamps
on sidewalks to your car, past
candles reflected in windows, while
mineral sirens fade in the don’t
return,— driving home past
pre-spring plum blossom riot
moments of your thought...

Those trees rush to rust leaves,
each a time-hinge with great energy—
they can’t bear inexactitude.
News of revolts in the squares —there—
& here, the envious have gone to cafés
to speak in order to leave things out—
Love, literature is in flames,
it was meant to be specific—;
you have driven past these rooms
ten thousand times to make your report;
make your report;
never forget how you felt—

Sometimes poetry is the only thing that is capable of articulating anger,or the very thing to quench anger's fire, or direct anger to more productive use.

We are in dire need of poetry and writers. Lucky for us, we have the shoulders of past and present poets and writers on which to stand, (and in a few cases, we have metaphorical/fictitious shoulders that will serve just as well).

I've posted poems from Poet Laureate of the United States, (1995 to 1997), and Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, (2001 to 2007), Robert Hass and his wife, Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts award winning poet, Brenda Hillman. I also posted photos of both, because I think seeing photos of both poets, illustrates the outrageousness and senslessness of the violence both recently were subjected to by Berkely police on the campus of UC Berkely.

If you haven't heard, both lauded poets were beaten, as in pushed to the ground, hit with billy clubs, while around them, other colleagues, faculty, students, and alumni, were, without provocation, beaten, dragged by the hair, pepper sprayed, arrested for peaceably assembling or being witness to the Occupy movement.

Hass recounts his experience in the New York Times Opinion section.