A POET from PAWTUCKET

 

I am not the  only  poet from Pawtucket.

There is another who is really good. 

GALWAY KINNELL.

My mother liked his work so it was quite a delight when she met  Galway's mother at the Mobile Library that used to come to a  parking lot near our house.,

She loved that his mother had used one of the names of the counties of Ireland as his first name.  Her family is from County Tyrone and if she had been blessed with a son that would be his name.

She wished that she had named me Clare or Kerry or Mayo, but she had named me after my father, Norman, so there could be no confusion that I was his child.

Confusion and disarray had come into my father's life in 1918 when his mother and his grandmother died within a week of each other of the Spanish flu. He and his brother Irving and sister Grace became orphans  all under the age of 6 years.

My mother  is the other poet from Pawtucket.She wrote and published poems  that I recall from my youngest years. She loved  the poetry of Yeats and knew many of his poems by heart.She also loved  the poems of Houseman publishd in the SHROPSHIRE LAD.

My mother was forced into Coats Mill the day after she finished the 8th Grade.  Her formal education ended then, but not her informal education.

When I was in college she would follow my course  syllabus and read the same books that I was reading  in the course and we would discuss them

She never stopped learning and growing. 

Here  is a poem  by Galway.

Galway Kinnell


Another Night in the Ruins

1

In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple
of the eternal, a last bird
crosses over, ‘flop, flop’
adoring
only the instant.

2

Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning-bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderbird
formed like the face
of my brother, looking nostalgically down
on blue,
lightning-fisted moments of the Atlantic.

3

Wind tears itself hollow
in the eave of my ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark,
upside down
ravines into which night sweeps
our torn wings, our ink-spattered feathers.

4

I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow
of nothingness mooing, mooing
down the bones.

5

Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the earth
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow!

6

How many
nights must it take each one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
of the bits of that bird
which creates itself again
in its ashes,
that for a man
as he goes up in flames his one work
is to open himself, to be
the flames?