Sunday Words: Philip Levine/Poet Laureate

He sings the songs of America's heartland.  How fitting that he's been tapped this year to sing of poetry and reality in America today.  Congrats to Philip Levine, this year's Poet Laureate.

Among Children by Philip Levine

I walk among the rows of bowed heads--
the children are sleeping through fourth grade
so as to be ready for what is ahead,
the monumental boredom of junior high
and the rush forward tearing their wings
loose and turning their eyes forever inward.
These are the children of Flint, their fathers
work at the spark plug factory or truck
bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs
to the widows of the suburbs. You can see
already how their backs have thickened,
how their small hands, soiled by pig iron,
leap and stutter even in dreams. I would like
to sit down among them and read slowly
from The Book of Job until the windows
pale and the teacher rises out of a milky sea
of industrial scum, her gowns streaming
with light, her foolish words transformed
into song, I would like to arm each one
with a quiver of arrows so that they might
rush like wind there where no battle rages
shouting among the trumpets, Hal Ha!
How dear the gift of laughter in the face
of the 8 hour day, the cold winter mornings
without coffee and oranges, the long lines
of mothers in old coats waiting silently
where the gates have closed. Ten years ago
I went among these same children, just born,
in the bright ward of the Sacred Heart and leaned
down to hear their breaths delivered that day,
burning with joy. There was such wonder
in their sleep, such purpose in their eyes
dosed against autumn, in their damp heads
blurred with the hair of ponds, and not one
turned against me or the light, not one
said, I am sick, I am tired, I will go home,
not one complained or drifted alone,
unloved, on the hardest day of their lives.
Eleven years from now they will become
the men and women of Flint or Paradise,
the majors of a minor town, and I
will be gone into smoke or memory,
so I bow to them here and whisper
all I know, all I will never know.

This poem makes me as sad as it makes me proud.  He's Yeats (in "Among Schoolchildren"), if Yeats lived in Detroit and worked for a living and was realistic about the futures of the schoolchildren in front of him.  Levine captures the promise and the potential of children - both youngsters before puberty, and the babies they once were - as well as the inevitable human failings they will achieve as adults.  However, even faced with those who will "turn against me or the light," the speaker offers all he has, "all I will ever know" - his words, his whispers, his voice, his poems.

As parents, doesn't that voice always win?  That urge just to tell, and keep telling, in the hope that our words will make some small impact on the lives of our children?  We have no way of knowing what our children will become - but we know that they will make mistakes, and we know that they have infinite promise.  So, we bank the fires of wonder with our words, knowing that their days of feeling unloved will come in the future, and hoping beyond hope that what we had to tell them will be enough to keep them warm.