The Boy
by Marilyn Hacker
It is the boy in me who’s looking out
the window, while someone across the street
mends a pillowcase, clouds shift, the gutter spout
pours rain, someone else lights a cigarette?
(Because he flinched, because he didn’t whirl
around, face them, because he didn’t hurl
the challenge back—”Fascists?”—not “Faggots”—Swine!
he briefly wonders—if he were a girl . . .)
He writes a line. He crosses out a line.
I’ll never be a man, but there’s a boy
crossing out words: the rain, the linen-mender,
are all the homework he will do today.
The absence and the priviledge of gender
confound in him, soprano, clumsy, frail.
Not neuter—neutral human, and unmarked,
the younger brother in the fairy tale
except, boys shouted “Jew!” across the park
at him when he was coming home from school.
The book that he just read, about the war,
the partisans, is less a terrible
and thrilling story, more a warning, more
a code, and he must puzzle out the code.
He has short hair, a red sweatshirt. They know
something about him—that he should be proud
of? That’s shameful if it shows?
That got you killed in 1942.
In his story, do the partisans
have sons? Have grandparents? Is he a Jew
more than he is a boy, who’ll be a man
someday? Someone who’ll never be a man
looks out the window at the rain he thought
might stop. He reads the sentence he began.
He writes down something that he crosses out.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Mauve Mittens by Vaishnavi Prakash
- Morning Poem #39 by Wanda Phipps
- Hero-Worship poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Orlando Furioso Canto 3 by Ludovico Ariosto
- The Bath-Tub poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Яков Полонский – Одному из усталых
- Morning Poem #6 by Wanda Phipps
- Гавриил Державин – Анакреон у печки
- Attack of the Squash People by Marge Piercy
- Robert Burns: Verses To Collector Mitchell :
- After Rain by P. K. Page
- Sonnet 69: Those parts of thee that the world’s eye doth view by William Shakespeare
- Юлия Друнина – Девчонка – что надо!
- Владимир Высоцкий – Я верю в нашу общую звезду
- Sonnet. The Day Is Gone poem – John Keats poems
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).
