Vox Populi
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Barbara Hamby: Ode on Anger, the Dalai Lama, and Elliot’s Red Boots
I get this story second hand since I’m not speaking
to my brother, who can be charming until he isn’t,
which always happens, and his main beef against me
seems to be that I’m older, which I can’t see any way
of changing except by sorcery or a rift in the time-space
continuum, but my sister calls me with a report
every time he checks in and the latest is that he finds a photo
of the Dalai Lama as a boy, which he places
by his bed, only he doesn’t know that it’s the Dalai Lama,
who comes to him in a dream and tells my brother
that he has to let go of his anger, to which he replies,
“I don’t want to. I love my anger,”
and the Dalai Lama says, “It’s not doing you or anyone else
any good,” and when my brother wakes up
he calls my sister, and tells her he’s had this epiphany,
though we’ve been telling him the same thing
for years, but I suppose a universal spiritual leader
carries more weight than your stupid sisters,
who were always trying to boss you around and made
good grades and went to college, la ti da,
but I think about my brother’s son, when he was four,
a beautiful boy, who I loved to baby sit,
and we were going somewhere one day, and I told him,
“Honey, put on your shoes,” and my father
had given him some red cowboy boots, which he loved,
so I left him putting them on but when I returned,
he had them on the wrong feet, so I said, “Darling,
you have them on the wrong feet,” and he
replied, “I like them that way,” but in a few minutes
he hobbled to another room and came back
with the boots on the right feet, and we said nothing more
about them, and I guess that’s what I wish
would happen with my brother’s anger, though he might
have to go to Mars and come back to off-load
that particular cargo, because aren’t we more like pack mules
than gods most days, picking our way
across the desert or up a mountain path with avalanches
and the heaviest loads are our grudges and fears
while poetry and beauty rest on our shoulders like fairy wings
or one of those pastries in a shop window in Paris,
almost too beautiful to eat, but eat it we do
with its frosting of butter and sugar and eggs.
From Holoholo (2021, Pittsburgh). Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author and publisher.
Copyright 2021 Barbara Hamby
Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. She is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo (Pitt, 2021). She has also edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar.
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Beautiful Barbara! Tony came to our ranch during our Poetry and Barbeque weekend in 2017 and particularly loved the cows—went over to the fence and he squatted to be face to face with them. He was stellar at the event, so many magical things happened, from a local poet unexpectedly coming forth and reading a poem about boys who’d gone out in a light craft, lost at sea forever, to Tony stopping the program in the beginning to “roast” me, out of the blue. It had to do with certain gratitude he felt about being present, cows, our event. We have a recording…
By your poem, I shall look to the stars, henceforth, for resolution to familial problems, no more settlements on earth.
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Tony was so brilliant and tender. I first got to know him when he sent me a fan note. Then he sent one to me and David and said: I didn’t know you two were married. Do you have some kind of methamphetamine cult down there? That was Tony. He really changed my life when he invited me to teach at Houston for a semester. I was in adjunct hell here, but when someone else wanted me, they noticed here. I’ll always be grateful.
My brother quit drinking, so now we’re speaking again. He’s a different person.
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Barbara:
I had a different outcome with my eldest sister whom we lost several years ago, a sad story about addiction, indigence, co-dependency and such. She was never belligerent, but she somehow balked at every “gate” offered in her life, and she had everything going for her including being gorgeously beautiful. Sometime we’ll talk about it, I wrote a Villanelle “Dirge” about her dying, driving home from a trip when someone violated HIPPA to tell me she was in intensive care and in a bad way.
So I was able to see her, but she was in a coma and It was very sad. You’ve still got that fellow—hang in there!
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You’re all innocence and associations, Barbara, as you appear to be riding the free current of your thoughts. But damn if you didn’t know where you were headed all along! Straight for the fairy wings and frosting! Yummmmm!
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A great response, Louise, as always. Thank you.
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I didn’t really know where this was going. I try to have faith in my initial image and let the rest come as it will. Who knew that my obsession with pastries when we lived in Paris would work out so well.
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You have such great instincts, Barbara, that you just follow the music of the language until it leads you home.
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Fine poem! Thanks for posting this graceful, funny/serious piece.
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Thanks, Jefferson!
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Another wry (but seriously mature) one that I am, as always, delighted to (re-)encounter! You rock. Woman!
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Sydney, You always make me feel like a million spondulicks!
Your fan, Barbara
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I love this ! The narrative is simple but the content all the more expressive and deep. Thanks for posting !
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Oh, yes, Barbara Hamby’s poems are gifts of the spirit.
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This poem is as beautiful as that pastry in a shop window in Paris and I so enjoyed eating it with its frosting of wistfulness and wisdom and sweetness…
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Cool, David. I love your simile.
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