Happiness

Norman Rockwell

Freedom From Want

Happiness

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.

And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.

They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them.

And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river

And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

~ Carl Sandburg ~

The Portrait

Caspar David Friedrich

Woman at the Window

The Portrait

My mother never forgave my father

for killing himself,

especially at such an awkward time

and in a public park,

that spring

when I was waiting to be born.

She locked his name

in her deepest cabinet

and would not let him out,

though I could hear him thumping.

When I came down from the attic

with the pastel portrait in my hand

of a long-lipped stranger

with a brave moustache

and deep brown level eyes,

she ripped it into shreds

without a single word

and slapped me hard.

In my sixty-fourth year

I can feel my cheek

still burning.

~Stanley Kunitz ~

Digging

Caspar David Friedrich

Window and Garden

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner's bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

~ Seamus Heaney ~

My Papa’s Waltz

Paul Cezanne

Women with Coffeepot

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

~ Theodore Roethke ~

I am asking you to come back home

Edvard Munch

Spring

I am asking you to come back home

I am asking you to come back home
Before you lose the chance of seein’ me alive
You already missed your Daddy
You already missed you Uncle Howard
You missed Luciel.
I kept them and I buried them.
You showed up for the funerals.
Funerals are the easy part.

You even missed that dog you left.
I dug him a hole and put him into it.
It was a Sunday morning, but dead animals
don’t wait no better than dead people.

My mamma used to say she could feel herself
runnin’ short of the breath of life. So can I.
And I am blessed tired of burying the things I love.
Somebody else can do that job to me.
You’ll be back then; you come for funerals.

I’d rather you came back now and got my stories.
I’ve got whole lives of stories that belong to you.
I could fill you up with stories;
stories I aint told nobody yet,
stories with your name, your blood in them.
Aint nobody gonna hear them if you don’t
and you aint gonna hear them unless you get back home.

When I am dead, it will not matter
how hard you press your ear to the ground.

~ Jo Carson ~

Those Winter Sundays

Paul Cezanne

The Artist’s Father

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices?

~ Robert Hayden ~

Those Georgia Sundays

Hale Woodruff

Georgia Landscape

Those Georgia Sundays

In Georgia, too, my father got up early,
wearing piss-stained boxers in the August heat,
then with yellow hands that reeked of Vantage
Ultra Light 100s, made the A/C shudder

Jesus Fucking Christ, I’d thank him
As he moaned, hacking and spitting in the john.
And when the toaster clunked, slowly
I would rise and make the sofa bed,

knowing we had no time left, yet saying
nothing to him, all the way to our weekend job
waxing floors at Southern Bell

What did I know? I knew damned well.
And even over the hum I heard death hiss
Through those austere and lonely offices.

~ Patrick Phillips ~

Starlight

Joan Miro

The Farm

Starlight

My father stands in the warm evening

on the porch of my first house.

I am four years old and growing tired.

I see his head among the stars,

the glow of his cigarette, redder

than the summer moon riding

low over the old neighborhood. We

are alone, and he asks me if I am happy.

"Are you happy?" I cannot answer

I do not really understand the word,

and the voice, my father's voice, is not

his voice, but somehow thick and choked,

a voice I have not heard before, but

heard often since. He bends and passes

a thumb beneath each of my eyes.

The cigarette is gone, but I can smell

the tiredness that hangs on his breath.

He has found nothing, and he smiles

and holds my head with both his hands.

Then he lifts me to his shoulder,

and now I too am there among the stars,

as tall as he. Are you happy? I say.

He nods in answer, Yes! oh yes! oh yes!

And in that new voice he says nothing,

holding my head tight against his head,

his eyes closed up against the starlight,

as though those tiny blinking eyes

of light might find a tall, gaunt child

holding his child against the promises

of autumn, until the boy slept

never to waken in that world again.

~ Philip Levine ~

For, Brother, What Are We?

Paul Cezanne

The Murder

For, Brother, What Are We?

For, brother, what are we?

We are the sons of our father.
Whose face we have never seen,
We are the sons of our father,
Whose voice we have never heard,
We are the sons of our father,
To whom we have cried for strength and comfort
In our agony,
We are the sons of our father,
Whose life like ours
Was lived in solitude and in the wilderness,
We are the sons of our father,
To whom we can only speak out
The strange, dark burden of our heart and spirit,
We are the sons of our father,
And we shall follow the print of his foot forever.

~ Thomas Wolfe ~

There is another sky

James Jacques Joseph Tissot

The Bunch of Lilacs

There is another sky

There is another sky,

Ever serene and fair,

And there is another sunshine,

Though it be darkness there;

Never mind faded forests, Austin,

Never mind silent fields -

Here is a little forest,

Whose leaf is ever green;

Here is a brighter garden,

Where not a frost has been;

In its unfading flowers

I hear the bright bee hum:

Prithee, my brother,

Into my garden come!

~ Emily Dickinson ~

from a letter to her brother, Austin