Sample Poems by Arlene Swift Jones
World War II Veteran
(Andrea, speaker)
At night in bed
he kicks the enemy
(but I am there).
He strikes the air
with a fist, muttering
words without softness.
His dreams are metal,
steel blue and unyielding,
nothing exquisite. No
children sleeping,
no comfort of apples.
Who comes to him
in the night, and lays hands
upon him, maiming
what it didn't kill?
Lucy Wheelock Thomas
(speaker)
I entered Deenewood holding my bouquet
white as my wedding gown. I saw the lilies
fade, I smelled their sweet decay
in that dark hall, dimmed by leaded windows.
What light remained was blocked by rusty velvet
draperies--once, I think they were blood-red.
But eyes adjust to darkness…Outside
snow lay bright on top the ground.
The wallpaper reached out, entangling me
with leaves of grey and brown, blue
outlined in black, that twined and climbed
the walls, up two open stairways.
As I stopped on the stairs, I saw
initials frosted on the leaded glass:
JWT. I didn't know I would
become their gardienne,
It was 1914, and I, the first wife
at Deenewood. I served tea to guests,
cucumber sandwiches and petit fours
at four o'clock, on Limoges china. Dinner
was refined--candles, subdued conversation
that began with soup and went through courses.
After Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination
in Sarajevo and the Kaiser 's vow
to stand by Austria, my husband had nothing
more to say to me: he went to war.
Sarah arrived
when he was gone. He came back, with less
to say. Then I was lucky--I had a son
to keep the male initials that monogrammed
the house. My own, in curliques—
on a dozen silver goblets--lay
in a hard silk-covered box with anti-tarnish
lining. Such things, increasingly unused,
I locked in closets.
I could not love
this house, so I possessed it, fiercely--with
its objets--to guard it for my son. I knew
it was a house most girls would dream of. I talked
to Jennie, who watched from picture frames; I touched
her name--gilt letters tooled on her Bible.
She should have been a playmate, together
we should have tried on our wedding dresses
in the attic (Hopelessly, I wanted
her approval).
I tried to isolate my children from anger
in the house--it spewed like foam sputtering
from the brook's swollen flow in spring,
when rotted leaves choke passages. I bit
my tongue bloody holding anger back,
asking Jenny to admire (again talking
to a photo) and then to calm
her raging son, while from the clock I’d wound
and polished, I heard the peacocks cry.
When my son was sent away
to boarding school, I broke every rule
with my daughter: we smoked in stealth,
I stole my husband's cigarettes.…
What
is there for you, my daughter, but to marry?
Yet emptiness will be what you embrace.
And what for you, my son? Don't come back
till you can claim what will be yours--what I
have kept for you. And never bring a bride
where she's not welcome.
John Williams Thomas,
(speaker)
Daughter, what did you do? What did you do?
You married a Jew! A Jew! You had four sons,
each one of them a Jew! You erased my line,
you with your bloody Jew. I could have had
a future lineage if you'd been the son.
Damn you, to marry a Jew!
Your brother was not meat for me.
Adored by his mother she sent him off
to boarding school to get away from me.
Half of him resembled me--but his sad eyes!
My God! how they reminded me of failure:
of my own, of my marriage to a woman
bred to serve a man. But I was used to servants.
What else was there for her, for any woman,
but to serve a man? And I was a catch.
I learned to hate how she countenanced me.
I hated me. But then...No! I did not. Any woman
I admired must stand up to me
and she did not. She wilted like a flower
in drought. Who got the best of whom--of her,
or me?
How could I have loved a daughter more
than I could love a son? You stood up to me,
in fear at first, and then contempt.
My mother-wilted son I could not admire
any more than I admired myself.
His eyes reflected back the sorrow
that was my own: my stern-faced father
giving daily homage to a woman
I had never known and learned to hate—
his bride, a phantom mother. I thought
that boys with mothers were in storybooks.
Though he never told me, I could see
the way he looked at me he saw his love
awry, he saw her die, and knew himself
and I death's instruments….
Daughter, I said the world's awry
when one dines daily with a presence,
ghostly for me, lingering in a house,
and sees his father stand and stare at space,
half-expecting, hoping she might fleetingly
appear, that he, somehow, could undo
his appetites and she could love him still.
I swore I could not live as he lived. I
have not!
Children are not made
in heaven. Can one desire a woman
never taught to love, but taught to bear it?
Daughter, I could not! My ladies
were not ladies, but they served a purpose
well, for which they were intended.
Sex was not, to them, a burden.
You have borne it! But in spite of me,
in order to erase my tree with Jews
for sons. They are not my grandsons
and I...I have done with you.