Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2026.
Disorder and Early Sorrow, poems by Richard W Halperin.
Disorder and Early Sorrow
Third Person
He thinks of writers he admires this night.
Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding,
‘the we of me,’ which was my wife’s
audition piece, at age ten, for acting school.
Edward Albee, A Delicate Balance,
for which there are no words, except his.
Genius is the third person singular.
The I of the artist is not in it.
There is no Carson McCullers
in Frankie or the sparrow.
There is no Albee in Agnes
or Tobias or the long-dead child Teddy.
Genius weeps. Jesus wept.
Some audiences weep.
Saint Theresa of Avila says
there are tears in heaven.
There have to be,
or how could God wipe them away?
The Real Helen
In Euripides’ great play Helen,
Helen and Menelaus, no longer young,
reunite in Egypt, where she has been living
during all the years of the Trojan War.
It was an illusory Helen – a trick
of the gods – whom the war was fought over.
The play is Helen’s throughout: her words
about fate, deception, love, manipulation,
cleanness, hope. But at play’s end, what do we,
what do the gods who have been listening,
what do Menelaus and the Chorus
actually know about this woman,
who survived and still survives? Nothing.
Because she is Helen.
Constellations
The Wisconsin of my youth
and the plaid shirts I used to wear in it
have not been taken up to the sky
and become constellations. Or they
may have been, and my receptors
haven’t noticed.
Babies notice. Babies may see
constellations in everything:
a sock, a finger, the wallpaper.
Some adults do. Emily Dickinson did.
Birds, and some children, flee
hours before a tsunami strikes.
The Greeks built a temple
to Athena. Much of it still stands.
A statue of her was in it. It was
not what she looked like. No one
had ever seen her. The impulse
to build the temple is exactly
what she looks like.
No one had ever heard her voice.
But, based upon some stories,
they knew what her voice
was like: not the sound of war
but the sound of a flute.
Stop, and Imagine
But nothing stops. Pause, and imagine
is all that is possible. I pause,
and imagine, as I read Robert Frost’s sonnet
‘The Silken Tent’ which begins ‘She is as
in a field a silken tent.’ Love is in it.
Physics is in it. The wind – which as in
Greek tragedy does what it does – is in it.
I imagine, and see everything important,
good and bad, which has happened to me.
As now moves forward, because nothing stops.
The wind has hurt me but I cannot hurt the wind.
A silken tent reminds me of that.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin holds U.S.-Irish dual nationality and lives in Paris. On November 1, 2025, Salmon Poetry/Cliffs of Moher published All the Tattered Stars: Selected & New Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods: 92 poems from previous collections by Salmon and by Lapwing/Belfast & Ballyhalbert and 26 new poems. Mr. Halperin suggests, on the back cover, that the poems be viewed ‘as birds perched on a horizontal line. Everything perched lightly.’ Mr Halperin’s work is part of University College Dublin’s Irish Poetry Reading Archive.