Stanley Kunitz 시 "Halley's Comet"

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Edward Hirsch, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart 에서 (8)

 

Halley's Comet

 

Miss Murphy in first grade

wrote its name in chalk

across the board and told us

it was roaring down the stormtracks

of the Milky Way at frightful speed

and if it wandered off its course

and smashed into the earth

there'd be no school tomorrow.

A red-beared preacher fro the hills

with a wild look in his eyes

stood in the public square

at the playground's edge

proclaiming he was sent by God

to save every one of us,

even the little children.

"Repent ye sinners!" he shouted,

waving his hand-lettered sigh.

At supper I felt sad to think

that it was probably

the last meal I'd share

with my mother and my sisters;

but I felt excited too

and scarcely touched my plates.

So mother scolded me

and sent me early to my room.

The whole famiy's asleep

except for me. They never heard me steal

into the stairwell hall and climb

the ladder to the fresh night air.

Look for me, Father, on the roof

of the red brick building

at the foot of Green Street --

that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.

I'm the boy in the white flannel gown

sprawled on this coarse gravel bed

searching the starry sky,

waiting for the world to end.

 

(1995)

 

 

Stanley Kunitz catapulted himself back into childhood in his poem "Halley's Comet" (1995). Kunitz was five years old on May 19, 1910, the day that Halley's Comet was scheduled to pass the earth and, if it strayed off course, crash into our planet, thus potentially blowing up the world.

 

Kunitz employs an unrhymed three-beat, or trimeter, line, which ... Elizabeth Bishop marshaled to invoke her seven-year-old self in her epiphanic lyric "In tte Waiting Room," also set in Worcester, where she grew up. Bishop's poem, which is about losing and finding a self, stands behind Kunitz's testimonial like a protective older sister.

 

Kunitz never knew his father, who committed suicide before he was born, but he mourned the loss all his life. His mother never forgave Solomon Kunitz for killing himself and eradicated all traces of his memory from their home....

   At the end of "Halley's Comet," there's an agitated longing in the way the speaker suddenly calls out, "Look for me, Father, on the roof ..."

 

 

 

 

Halley's Comet, 1910 (사진: Wikimedia)