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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=507861" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Poem With Refrains</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The opening scene. The yellow, coal-fed fog<br>Uncurling over the tainted city river,<br>A young girl rowing and her anxious father<br>Scavenging for corpses. Funeral meats. The clever<br>Abandoned orphan. The great athletic killer<br>Sulking in his tent. As though all stories began<br>With someone dying.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">  When her mother died,<br>My mother refused to attend the funeral--<br>In fact, she sulked in her tent all through the year<br>Of the old lady's dying. I don't know why:<br>She said, because she loved her mother so much<br>She couldn't bear to see the way the doctors,<br>Or her father, or--someone--was letting her mother die.<br>&quot;Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet;<br>Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">She fogs things up, she scavenges the taint.<br>Possibly that's the reason I write these poems.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But they did speak: on the phone. Wept and argued,<br>So fiercely one or the other often cut off<br>A sentence by hanging up in rage--like lovers,<br>But all that year she never saw her face.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">They lived on the same block, four doors apart.<br>&quot;Absence my presence is; strangeness my grace;<br>With them that walk against me is my sun.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">&quot;Synagogue&quot; is a word I never heard,<br>We called it shul, the Yiddish word for school.<br>Elms, terra-cotta, the ocean a few blocks east.<br>&quot;Lay institution&quot;: she taught me we didn't think<br>God lived in it. The rabbi is just a teacher.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But what about the hereditary priests,<br>Descendants of the Cohanes of the Temple,<br>Like Walter Holtz--I called him Uncle Walter,<br>When I was small. A big man with a face<br>Just like a boxer dog or a cartoon sergeant.<br>She told me whenever he helped a pretty woman<br>Try on a shoe in his store, he'd touch her calf<br>And ask her, &quot;How does that feel?&quot; I was too little<br>To get the point but pretended to understand.<br>&quot;Desire, be steady; hope is your delight,<br>An orb wherein no creature can ever be sorry.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">She didn't go to my bar mitzvah, either.<br>I can't say why: she was there, and then she wasn't.<br>I looked around before I mounted the steps<br>To chant that babble and the speech the rabbi wrote<br>And there she wasn't, and there was Uncle Walter<br>The Cohane frowning with his doggy face:<br>&quot;She's missing her own son's musaf.&quot; Maybe she just<br>Doesn't like rituals. Afterwards, she had a reason<br>I don't remember. I wasn't upset: the truth<br>Is, I had decided to be the clever orphan<br>Some time before. By now, it's all a myth.<br>What is a myth but something that seems to happen<br>Always for the first time over and over again?<br>And ten years later, she missed my brother's, too.<br>I'm sorry: I think it was something about a hat.<br>&quot;Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air,<br>Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair;<br>Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">She sees the minister of the Nation of Islam<br>On television, though she's half-blind in one eye.<br>His bow tie is lime, his jacket crocodile green.<br>Vigorously he denounces the Jews who traded in slaves,<br>The Jews who run the newspapers and the banks.<br>&quot;I see what this guy is mad about now,&quot; she says,<br>&quot;It must have been some Jew that sold him the suit.&quot;<br>&quot;And the same wind sang and the same wave whitened,<br>And or ever the garden's last petals were shed,<br>In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But when they unveiled her mother's memorial stone,<br>Gathered at the graveside one year after the death,<br>According to custom, while we were standing around<br>About to begin the prayers, her car appeared.<br>It was a black car; the ground was deep in snow.<br>My mother got out and walked toward us, across<br>The field of gravestones capped with snow, her coat<br>Black as the car, and they waited to start the prayers<br>Until she arrived. I think she enjoyed the drama.<br>I can't remember if she prayed or not,<br>But that may be the way I'll remember her best:<br>Dark figure, awaited, attended, aware, apart.<br>&quot;The present time upon time pass&euml;d striketh;<br>With Phoebus's wandering course the earth is graced.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The air still moves, and by its moving, cleareth;<br>The fire up ascends, and planets feedeth;<br>The water passeth on, and all lets weareth;<br>The earth stands still, yet change of changes breedeth.&quot;</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Robert+Pinsky">Robert Pinsky</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=507861" data-title="Poem With Refrains de Robert Pinsky" data-description="The opening scene. The yellow, coal-fed fog
Uncurling over the tainted city river,
A young girl rowing and her anxious father
Scavenging for corpses. Funeral meats. The clever
Abandoned orphan. The great athletic killer
Sulking in his tent. As tho..."></div>
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