Been thinkin’ about…Barn poems

I was about eight years old, wearing overalls, and climbing over the big horse gate in the barn. There were two big horse gates in our little barn, a ladder to the haymow made of mismatched wood, and a little plastic duck with big blue eyes — a duck covered in dust and cobwebs — who perched on a big roofing nail on one of the mismatched wood partitions. I don't know where the duck came from. He was keeping watch over the barn since before I was born, and he kept a watch over me when I sat on the John Deere garden tractor and pretended to drive.

That big horse gate had to be climbed over whenever I played with the goats. And I played with the goats often. The gate was a special thing for me, as an eight year old. For some reason, I had made the act of climbing over a point of repetition for whatever I thought — or needed — to learn. The summer before, every time I climbed over the gate, I had practiced rolling my r's just like my fluent-in-Spanish sister had demanded. It took a while, but I learned. Too bad I never tried learning to whistle the same way.

But this was April and I was nearing the end of the second grade. Kindergarten, first grade, second grade, the end of each school year was marked by a school program, and we all had our performance assignments. Deathly afraid of singing in public, I was weirdly unafraid of speaking in public—specifically of reciting poetry. And I had already gotten my assignment, all eight stanzas —

"Under the spreading chestnut-tree / The village smithy stands;

The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands /

And the muscles of his brawny arms / Are strong as iron bands.

Poetry has been given an effete quality over the past several generations, conjuring images of dainty men and tea-sipping, over-thinking intellectuals. Or of women in rooms of cut flowers and little overdressed children, coddled and disallowed to grow up. Too bad for me that, at eight, I already loved poetry.

"His hair is crisp, and black, and long; His face is like the tan;

His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whate'er he can,

And looks the whole world in the face / For he owes not any man.

I also began whispering the poetry while sitting at the supper table, reaching for the hickory-flavored barbecue sauce I loved so much on my fried round steak. My mom had taught me well in learning poetry, which was a requisite every Friday during the school year. But these words by Longfellow were different, and certainly not effete. I wondered what it would be like to grow up to be a man like "The Village Blacksmith."

Much to the chagrin of many members of my family as well as the Department of Education, I was never enrolled in public school but I did go to a weird private school for my first three school years. The school was in one church and then another, though not a Christian school, and their patterns of teaching and discipline would best be described as hippie-like. However, one bright spot was "poetry Fridays," an event that filled most of my fellow students with something ranging from disdain to tear-stained-trembling fear.

Every Friday morning, every student was expected to recite a poem of their choice, all ages, all grades, no exceptions. It was a small school, perhaps 20 students total. Most mumbled and stumbled and sometimes cried their way through the exercise.

Poetry Fridays perhaps existed as some form of a behavioral group experiment as little — read no — help was given to actually learn the poems. We were just supposed to be ready. My secret weapon turned out to be my mom, who knew I would existentially collapse if I wasn't prepared for something. And so she taught me to choose my poem on each Friday afternoon after school, coaching me to hand-write the poem on paper over and over, then reciting the stanzas to her and myself every chance I got. In three years, I never missed a poem, never screwed up a recitation. And I fell in love with the lilt of the language —

"The moon? It is a griffin's egg, Hatching tomorrow night.

And how the little boys will watch / With shouting and delight /

To see him break the shell and stretch / And creep across the sky..."

Vachel Lindsay wrote "Yet Gentle Will the Griffin Be (What Grandpa Told the Children)," many, many years before I was born but his words of magic and mischief and hope stole into my soul, changing me forever. And tonight, I still hold my first, original poetry book in hand, feeling the dry-leaf texture of the aging pages, admiring the simple pen-and-ink illustrations, gratitude swelling my soul for the poets who created even as they asked themselves if what they were doing was worth it. Vachel Lindsay, manically depressed and in debt, killed himself at the age of 52, leaving behind a family. I'm grateful I had no internet to tell me that when I was eight and falling in love with his words.

My life would change again with a second-hand record by a 1950s' hillbilly crooner's songs of a lusty, brawny Americana mythos. The record was a buck-twenty-five, the price scrawled in black magic marker on masking tape stuck to the album's weathered cardboard. I was usually looking for books and toys at the Episcopal thrift shop but somehow the album found its way into my hands, then onto the old green record player which had helpfully wandered into my bedroom —

"If we need a mess of thinking / He's the Lincoln of the day /

If we're fixing for a tussle, it's his muscle all the way /

If we need a handsome fella / so the ladies' hearts can throb /

There's a Yankee Doodle dandy / always handy for the job..."

I listened to that Johnny Horton album over. And over. And over. Soaking in every drop of emotion, of Americana, of idealized manhood and mythic history. Here was another kind of poetry and something of an open barn door, a door into the past but also into an idea far-removed from my world of childhood things, of an overprotective mother, a distant father, and sisters tired of my exuberant goofiness. I couldn't explain why I wanted to touch, to live, this life and so I just listened to the album one more time, again —

"The night was coming very fast; It reached the gate as I ran past /

The pigeons had gone to the tower of the church / And all the hens were on their perch / Up in the barn, and I thought I heard / A piece of a little purring word / I stopped inside, waiting and staying / To try to hear what the hens were saying..."

I know little of the poet Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and I do not need to know more. I know her words, her poem "The Hens" having made its way into my soul in a way that still touches me at the golden hour of twilight. So, here's to poetry, to song, to a world of pain and beauty and hope, and words that live forever. Here's to little boys in overalls and grandpas who recite long-lost verse as cigarette smoke curls into the kitchen air. Here's to the quiet, sleepy chickens and enchanted, dreamlike griffins and here's to hoping, always, over and yet again, one day, to know what it means to be a man.