Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2025
Beauty from Ashes, poems by Richard W Halperin.
Beauty from Ashes
After the assassination of John F. Kennedy,
Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy were helped
for years by reading Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way,
for the deep strength
it gave them. According to friends,
Robert read from it daily
until he himself was assassinated.
I am helped by Isaiah 53, the Suffering
Servant – ‘so disfigured did he look
that he seemed no longer human’ –
which most images of Jesus entirely ignore.
My wife was helped by many things;
when young, by Howards End.
One can be helped by anything of
beauty which has managed to survive:
a picture, a book, a prayer, a
conversation, a piece of music.
Maugham, old, said he was helped
by the last Act of Die Meistersinger.
My father, at age 22, was asked
by his fraternity brothers at University
of Illinois, Urbana, to buy for
the fraternity house a record, the kind
we now call 78s. He bought
John McCormack singing the Prize
Song from Die Meistersinger.
This poem is not really about any
of this, but I must write it. It is
about the Aegean Sea, very bright
and very blue, very bright and very blue.
Far from the Ship The Nellie
Saturday Morning
‘Purgation, illumination, and (if so
privileged) union’ is part of Clifton Wolters’
preface to his modern translation of
The Cloud of Unknowing. All the late plays
and poems of T.S. Eliot dramatise these.
Most of the late plays and poems of Yeats
dramatise these. I live with all of them,
recently, as evil – both radical and banal –
lodge themselves in my natal land and
in a few countries which I know a little.
Things will move on. Nothing ever
goes away completely. Emersonian
America never went away. The Gorbachevs
never went away.
‘Purgation, illumination, and (if so
privileged) union. I think these happen
every second in each star, including
our own sun. And between each second,
what has to be purged.
A Small Blue Glass Stone
The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness
When young, I heard pings
which later I knew were poetry:
the shadow of the valley of death
the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg
the blue rose of forgetfulness.
The latter was from the film
The Thief of Bagdad, as was
‘I want to be a sailor sailing out to sea.’
I am way out on that sea now. Alone,
although for a while I was not alone.
Other sailors went sailing out to sea
in their little matchbox boats. Milton,
Larry Hart, so many. They help,
these great ones.
They find the music in the heart of sorrow.
The OK of having made so many mistakes.
The ridiculousness of explanation.
The ping of poetry.
‘Ecce Puer’
‘Ecce Puer.’ Sixteen fragile lines
by Joyce. A hand up – a newborn’s.
It makes me glad I did not throw in
the towel all those desperate times.
I did once, and was rescued.
‘Ecce Puer.’ Some things are
so pure they are the smile without
the moon or the pallor without
the moon. A faceprint in the sky
or crib which makes sky and crib
seem pudgy and dowdy.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin was born in Chicago, holds U.S.-Irish dual nationality and lives in Paris. His work is part of University College Dublin’s Irish Poetry Reading Archive. This year Salmon Poetry/Cliffs of Moher will bring out All the Tattered Stars: New and Selected Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods, which draws upon four Salmon collections and sixteen shorter collections via Lapwing Publications/Belfast & Ballyhalbert. In 2024, Lapwing brought out two additional collections: The Painted Word and Three Red Hats.
As always Richard, your poems are feathers on skin.
The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness: what a terrific poem, Richard!
Please let me know if you’re reading in Paris.
From one Parisian to another,
Kaaren