Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
Like Silk, poems by Richard W Halperin.
Like Silk
for Rose
The New York I grew up in, the adults,
the way they talked, the impeccable grammar,
the not always expensive restaurants
they chose to go to, the way they dressed
not very expensively to go to them
or to go to plays or concerts or supper clubs.
‘Sophisticated Lady.’ ‘Little Girl Blue.’
The economy of elegance, the dropped lines,
the sitting on a bench in Central Park
indefinitely. My mother-in-law was one
of these. She would not have used
the word elegant about herself. But she was.
I think of that this night, as an hour ago
her adopted son in New York State
sent me a text that she, at 101,
had just died. Another silk filament.
Red Carnation
I had on my desk once
a red carnation. In a little
glass vase. During a time
when I wrote poems
in fresh grief.
The poems helped.
The carnation helped.
The glass helped.
Many things still help,
including the poems of others.
I think of Jessie Lendennie’s
prose poem ‘Daughter,’
about the death of a mother.
At the end, the daughter says,
‘If you love me,
take me with you.’
Good poems – they have
to be good – can be about
anything. One of the poems
I live with is Joseph Woods’s
‘House-Sitting to Chet Baker.’
I must have read it, over
the years, a hundred times.
Recently, a friend told me
that Simone Weil, who died
young, wrote somewhere,
maybe in a notebook,
that God withdrew from
earth leaving only beauty
and suffering. I think,
if she had lived a little longer,
or like me a lot longer,
she might have changed
her mind about that.
Red Cardigan 2
She wears a red cardigan.
She is sitting in a chair
by the window in her
living room. She is reading
or pausing from reading.
Slim, grey-haired,
somehow an old lady.
How did all that happen?
She is Jewish, Russian,
Irish, so, a typical
American. She is a
mother, a grandmother,
a widow, cultivated,
educated, sceptical,
who one day became a bride,
had found herself a mate –
meaning, as far as the soul
goes, a ditto. So,
astonishment, then decades,
then grief, then wearing
a red cardigan, sitting in
a chair reading a book
or pausing from reading.
Words like agnostic,
astonishment, acceptance,
may be passing through
her mind in no order,
part of the wordless alphabet
everyone has a version of.
Waiting for something,
since pausing is always
waiting for something.
I am glad she existed.
I am glad I got, once,
to see her in her chair.
I am glad to know
her name. I am more,
because of her. I am glad of
red cardigans.
Gaza
‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul?
and why art thou disquieted in me?’
Psalm 42:5
If I were not disquieted
I would be only half-alive.
I wonder if that psalm
was written in Gaza.
Recently a friend mentioned
that it is possible that Gaza
got its name millennia ago
when it was a thriving port city
known for its gauze,
woven of cotton and silk.
Everything, even the beautiful,
catches on rocks and tears.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin’s is a U.S.-Irish dual national living in Paris. His collections are published by Salmon (four to date since 2010) and Lapwing (18 to date since 2014). In March 2025, Salmon will bring out Selected & New Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods, drawing upon these collections and including thirty new poems. Mr Halperin’s work is part of University College Dublin’s Irish Poetry Reading Archive. He reads frequently in Ireland; his most recent reading (on YouTube now) was at the Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend, Achill, Co. Mayo, last May.
Very moving Richard – and very Richard! Bravo!