American Life in Poetry: Column 527 & 528
Custodians
Retired from other trades, they wore
Work clothes again to mop the johns
And feed the furnace loads of coal.
Their roughened faces matched the bronze
Of the school bell the nun would swing
To start the day.
They limped but smiled,
Explored the secret, oldest nooks:
The steeple’s clock, dark attics piled
With inkwell desks, the caves beneath
The stage on Bingo night.
The pastor Bowed to the powers in their hands:
Fuses and fire alarms, the plaster
Smoothing a flaking wall, the keys
To countless locks.
They fixed the lights
In the crawl space above the nave
And tolled the bells for funeral rites.
Maintain what dead men made.
Time blurs
Their scripted names and well-waxed floors,
Those keepers winking through the years
And whistling down the corridors.
— David Livewell
The Strangers
After we picked you up at the Omaha airport,
we clamped you into a new car seat and listened to you yowl
beneath the streetlights of Nebraska.
Our hotel suite was plump with toys,
ready, we hoped, to soothe you into America.
But for a solid hour you watched the door,
shrieking, Umma, the Korean word for mother.
Once or twice you glanced back at us
and, in this netherworld where a door home
had slammed shut forever, your terrified eyes
paced between the past and the future.
Umma, you screamed, Umma!
But your foster mother back in Seoul never appeared.
Your new mother and I lay on the bed,
cooing your birth name,
until, at last, you collapsed into our arms.
In time, even terror must yield to sleep.
—Patrick Hicks
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Introduction copyright © 2015 by The Poetry Foundation. Poem copyright ©2014 by David Livewell, “Custodians,” from Southwest Review (Vol. 99, no. 2, 2014). Poem reprinted by permission of David Livewell and Southwest Review. Poem copyright ©2014 by Patrick Hicks, “The Strangers,” from Adoptable, (Salmon Poetry, 2014). Poem reprinted by permission of Patrick Hicks and the publisher.
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