Rachel Hadas: Three Poems

For Whom Do You Speak?

It’s not who you speak to, it’s whom you speak for, said Sharon Olds.
Adrienne Rich wrote “You are reading this poem,”
addressing a woman or women? No, speaking for them.
Cavafy’s “Walls” spoke for me at a time
when I sensed I had been stealthily walled in.
And when I raided my students’ poems for lines
to stitch into a cento, everyone
was speaking, it turned out, for everyone.
The poems peeled their private pronouns off
and bared their shared humanity,
which is what I hope some of my poems can sometimes do,
whether or not I know for whom I’m speaking.

~~~

Bouquet, Symposium

I’ve picked a messy big bouquet
to arrange in water. Let me see;
goldenrod, yarrow, vetch, buttercup,
clover, Queen Anne’s Lace, Oswego tea,
otherwise known as bee balm. And a bee
drawn by the colors buzzes by
to browse the real or facsimile
flowers, the bee, the butterfly
painted on the vase
and flies away.

Drinkers at a symposium raise
their painted wine cups, black figure or red,
which depict symposia: garlanded
feasters, satyrs, and hetairai move
to flute music, dancing
across the glazed surface of a cup
which very likely bears the painter’s name.
May some symposiast spare a second look
Before he tips out a libation
and drinks up.

~~~

The Train

Present into future: bold, bathed, new,
also familiar, a déjà vu.
Wait. Something I had never thought to see
again clanks forward from obscurity –
that creaky train I’d once been riding on,
a journey slow and grim.
Hasn’t that train left the station?
In what dim railyard has it been hidden, waiting?
And do I have to climb back on again?
The train rolls past. Spring sun
touches the sealed windows caked with grime.
And though I am a passenger in time,
I watch it passing and do not get on.

~

~~~~

Copyright 2023, 2024, 2025 Rachel Hadas. For Whom Do You Speak? first appeared in “Next Line, Please,” David Lehman’s blog in The American Scholar. The Train first appeared in The New Criterion.

Rachel Hadas is Professor of English, Rutgers University – Newark. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship; O.B. Harrison Poetry Prize (Folger Shakespeare Library); Prize in Literature, American Academy of Arts & Letters; Director’s Fellow, Pullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library