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
- Crossroads by Roger Hayes
- The Magician by Syed Kawsar Jamal
- Эмиль Верхарн – Восстание
- Before by Yehuda Amichai
- On The Death Of Damon. (Translated From Milton) by William Cowper
- Владимир Луговской – Фотограф
- Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket by Vachel Lindsay
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песня Сашки Червня
- Robert Burns: Thou Fair Eliza:
- One Step Backward Taken by Robert Frost
- Monument by Satish Verma
- Ballade Of The Southern Cross poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Николай Гербель – Ура, объявлена война
- On The Astrologers (From The Greek) by William Cowper
- Straw in the Street poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
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).
