JOHN HODGEN Reads at Boylston Public Library

Weltschmerz: Poem for the Great Divide

Tonight, with all that’s happening outside, all that’s being broken, denied,

all that’s slithering, roiling on the underside, all that must be decried, 

I’m remembering a young black man who allowed himself to be tied 

to a cross, to be hoisted up at a protest rally in 1970 in Washington 

against the killings at Jacksonville, Kent State, with Nixon’s incursion 

into Cambodia, a young black man allowing himself to be crucified,

allowing his pride and the pride of all other black men to be amplified,

holding his holy rage deep inside being perfectly fit and unfit to be tied. 

Anguish he was after, performance art, like Jesus on the stark hillside

of Calvary, anguish on that blazing hot day when graves opened wide

and Judas, poor saint that he was, hanged himself for allowing deicide.

How are you still in my heart all these years, you who well may have died

by now? How to hold your wild courage, how to carry you down from that hill? 

I am ill at these numbers, Hamlet sighed. I’m beaten, dry-eyed. I can feel the chill.