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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=477010" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>What I Have Not Been To The Few I Loved</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">What I have not been to the few I loved, <br>the cost of what I am. Whoever that is. <br>And the poor boy happy ending <br>that was supposed to conclude in money <br>to redeem the aristocratic poverty <br>of a doomed childhood, scrapped <br>from the start as slavishly predictable. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">I shone for a while, angry and bright <br>and university was an easy ordeal of guilt<br>while my mother washed floors in the Uplands, <br>and I went through culture shock <br>in my own country to learn that <br>not everybody lived the way we did<br>never further than twenty concrete blocks <br>away from the despair and poverty of home. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Three meals a day and shopping tours <br>to Europe, with a jaunt to Auschwitz <br>along the way. My mother would dress up <br>for three hours to go to the corner-store. <br>And it was everything I could do <br>to keep from laughing out loud <br>at the pygmies of pain in English Honours<br>who cried their eyes out in the library <br>because their mothers were social butterflies <br>and it was the sixties on the West Coast <br>when no one was suppose to live in vain. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And I remember the little wet doctor's sons <br>who used to remind me of who <br>they thought I was, asking me, at the end <br>of an advanced Shakespeare seminar, <br>at the end of a creative writing class, <br>after a three hour oral exam on Marlowe, <br>to sell them heroin I didn't use or deal<br>to make them feel, like the postcards of Auschwitz<br>that showed the skulls in the furnaces <br>and read Arbeit macht frei, <br>they were slumming with reality, lest <br>I forget despite how well I did in class, <br>where I came from. And the difference <br>was obvious and lasting. So many things <br>I had to master just to wear a plausible lifemask<br>into the golden future of the middle class.<br>How to sit down at a table and eat <br>with cutlery as if I were doing surgery. <br>How to relate to the trivializing of the poor, <br>listening squeamishly to the screening myths <br>of how the rich suffer at their hands.<br>How my mother with hands and knees, <br>cracked like lobsters boiled in bleach<br>was leeching them dry on welfare. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">I broke up with their daughters. <br>I punished their sons atavistically <br>and losing my taste for trying to prove<br>you could find diamonds in the coalbin <br>of everyone's ancestry, and I could stand <br>eye to eye with the stars as well as anyone, <br>I ran with a wolfpack of ex-cons <br>who accepted me as a well-educated <br>one of their own. And through it all<br>I returned to poetry after every brawl <br>and threw everybody off my back <br>to climb a private mountain of my own<br>while my mother said do <br>what makes you happy <br>and went on scrubbing floors.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=477010" data-title="What I Have Not Been To The Few I Loved de Patrick White" data-description="What I have not been to the few I loved, 
the cost of what I am. Whoever that is. 
And the poor boy happy ending 
that was supposed to conclude in money 
to redeem the aristocratic poverty 
of a doomed childhood, scrapped 
from the start as slavis..."></div>
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