Missing
from the family table and in the hospital was Harvey Shapiro, whose son is married
to my daughter-in-law’s sister, a man of my own age who also fought in World
War II and spent his working life as a teacher and editor, most notably for
prompting Martin Luther King to write his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
Now Harvey
Shapiro is being laid to rest amid eulogies that also recognize him as one of
the finest poets of his generation.
Half
a century ago as elegists around the world were pouring out their shock and grief
over Kennedy’s killing, he wrote one of the finest poems of all, “The National Cold Storage Company.”
Today
it summons up deep feeling about what my generation felt then and what we miss now
as our human losses mount:
The National
Cold Storage Company contains
More things than
you can dream of.
Hard by the
Brooklyn Bridge it stands
In a litter of
freight cars,
Tugs to one
side; the other, the traffic
Of the Long
Island Expressway.
I myself have
dropped into it in seven years
Midnight
tossings, plans for escape, the shakes.
Add this to the
national total--
Grant's tomb,
the Civil War, Arlington,
The young
President dead.
Above the
warehouse and beneath the stars
The poets creep
on the harp of the Bridge.
But see,
They fall into
the National Cold Storage Company
One by one. The
wind off the river is too cold,
Or the times too
rough, or the Bridge
Is not a harp at
all. Or maybe
A monstrous
birth inside the warehouse
Must be fed by
everything--ships, poems,
Stars, all the
years of our lives.
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