100 Poems to Break Your Heart

by Edward Hirsch

  Hence the gill-capped mushrooms with spores that create a path from the garden to the speaker’s room: “Blue-footed mushrooms line the walkway to my door.” They seem to rise out of the emptiness. These mushrooms are potentially edible, but the speaker declares, with her usual extravagance, “I would as soon / Die as serve them in a salad to the man I love.”

  The poem introduces a lover and declares outright, “We lie down / In the shape of a gondola.” The speaker hasn’t left her small room, and so this is a either a memory or a fantasy, which is presumably presented in the present tense because it is entirely present to her. The two lovers lying down in “the shape of a gondola” create a unique elongated form. This in turn leads to a statement about Venice in winter: “Venice is gorgeous cold.” But the specific date—“3 December”—leads her back to her own room, her sense of isolation, her fear of being locked in, locked out: “Unspeakable anxiety about locked-in syndrome, about a fourth world.” Two extremes of isolation are bound together: the individual who cannot move or communicate and the subpopulation of people socially excluded from global society. The speaker is terrified of both exclusions.

  This recluse confesses: “I cannot promise to say.” She may not be able to speak her “unspeakable anxiety,” but she does note that her figure for herself, the “violin spider,” “Has six good eyes, arranged in threes.” She is hyper-observant. The next statement is indented for emphasis:

  The rims of wounds have wounds as well.

  This oracular declaration suggests that wounds continue to enlarge; even the outermost parts of wounds have wounds. What is implied, but not stated, is that the speaker’s psychological wounds have continued to ramify. They have grown “rims,” and the “rims” are also wounded. The injury is far-reaching.

  There is an unspoken trauma or anguish underlying all this, which the speaker acknowledges: “Sphinx, small print, you are inscrutable.” She links the sphinx, that enigmatic mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion, with the small print in a formal agreement, the part that is binding but might be overlooked. There are things she cannot understand—some monstrous, some miniature—and they are also part of herself.

  The poem closes as if in the midst of a journey:

  On the roads, blue thistles, barely

  Visible by night, and, by these, you may yet find your way home.

  This suggests that the speaker, who once again refers to herself in the second person, has gotten lost in the dark. Like a figure in a fairy tale, she has found herself wandering on dark roads at night. But she also sees blue thistles, spiny perennials, which are scarcely visible. What can be dimly or duskily perceived may yet let her find her way home, the place where she started out. The phrase “may yet” is delicate and suggests that, though not inevitable, it is still possible for her to find her way back.

  Brock-Broido’s quirky, enigmatic lyric reveals and releases its secrets in stages, one by one. It may never give up all of them. But it does present an extraordinary portrait of a poet thinking about the end of her life. We know something deep and true about what she was like. How she thought, who she was. “Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room” is a sumptuous self-portrait of a poet in extremis, a precise enactment of her extravagant imagination.

  Yusef Komunyakaa

  * * *

  “The African Burial Ground”

  (2014)

  Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “The African Burial Ground” is a remembrance and an awakening. It has a quiet, insistent drumbeat that brings back the spirit of a forgotten people. The poem names and invokes a sacred space in lower Manhattan where the remains of enslaved and free Africans who lived and died in New York are now buried.

  The African Burial Ground

  They came as Congo, Guinea, & Angola,

  feet tuned to rhythms of a thumb piano.

  They came to work fields of barley & flax,

  * * *

  livestock, stone & slab, brick & mortar,

  to make wooden barrels, some going

  from slave to servant & half-freeman.

  * * *

  They built tongue & groove—wedged

  into their place in New Amsterdam.

  Decades of seasons changed the city

  * * *

  from Dutch to York, & dream-footed

  hard work rattled their bones.

  They danced Ashanti. They lived

  * * *

  & died. Shrouded in cloth, in cedar

  & pine coffins, Trinity Church

  owned them in six & a half acres

  * * *

  of sloping soil. Before speculators

  arrived grass & weeds overtook

  what was most easily forgotten,

  * * *

  & tannery shops drained there.

  Did descendants & newcomers

  shoulder rock & heave loose gravel

  * * *

  into the landfill before building crews

  came, their guitars & harmonicas

  chasing away ghosts at lunch break?

  * * *

  Soon, footsteps of lower Manhattan

  strutted overhead, back & forth

  between old denials & new arrivals,

  * * *

  going from major to minor pieties,

  always on the go. The click of heels

  the tap of a drum awaking the dead.

  Komunyakaa’s memorial poem employs a form that he has often used before—a vernacular triadic or three-step stanza, which unfolds into three descending and indented parts. It was invented by William Carlos Williams to address the problem of freedom and form in modern poetry. But whereas Williams conceived of “the variable foot” as the three stages of a single long line, Komunyakaa works it as a downward ladder of three interconnected lines. Here he employs it with great rhythmic flexibility and pulse to shape his experience.

  Komunyakaa skillfully varies end-stopped and enjambed lines within his three-step stanza. As you reread the poem, pay special attention to the extra pause and emphasis at the ends of lines that carry over. Some of them seem to leap over an abyss, such as “some going / from slave to servant . . .” or “Trinity Church / owned them . . .” The word “wedged” at the top of the third stanza creates a feeling of how these people were hemmed in, “wedged / into their place . . .” The people who strut overhead go “back & forth / between old denials & new arrivals.” Sometimes the poet creates an extra emphasis by varying longer sentences with shorter ones, such as the declaration, which takes up just half a line, that “They danced Ashanti.” Syncopation often occurs between the sentence and the line. Notice, for example, the line break and stanza break falling within one short sentence, the gulf that opens in “They lived // & died.”

  It’s worth pausing to say something about Komunyakaa’s use of the ampersand. This shorthand symbol for the conjunction “and” is something that he borrowed from his predecessors John Berryman, Etheridge Knight, and Larry Levis, and it adds an element of colloquial or jazzy informality and casual intimacy to his poems, which nod to the spoken even as they are written. Here that informality jostles a little with the formality of a visit to sacred ground.

  “The African Burial Ground” begins by remembering the people themselves: “They came as Congo, Guinea, & Angola.” The speaker pointedly does not say “They came from the Congo, Guinea, & Angola.” These people are not so much from those African countries as they are embodiments of them. The second line—“feet tuned to rhythms of a thumb piano”—recalls how they came with their own music inside them. The reference to the thumb piano, an African percussion instrument, shows the people moving from one continent to the other, carrying their own rhythm. These Africans may have been used to dancing, but they were brought to the New World in order to work. And they had been brought from three of the sites where the buying and selling of people took place.

  The poem focuses on the daily lives of these Africans in the New World, the backbreaking work they w
ere forced to do, how they persevered. It doesn’t concentrate on the cruelty inflicted upon them, though that hovers in the background. After all, much of the poem compresses, encapsulates, and dramatizes a history of slavery in New York City, which marks the progress of people “from slave to servant & half-freeman.” The speaker focuses on Black people and their experience, though he also recognizes the horrifying reality of slavery as part of the larger history of New York itself, the transformation of New Amsterdam, the name of the seventeenth-century Dutch settlement established at the southern tip of what is now known as Manhattan.

  The Dutch slave trade started in 1626 when the Dutch West India Company imported eleven African slaves. The first slave auction was held in 1655. The British expanded slavery in New York so much that by the early eighteenth century more than 40 percent of white households held slaves, often as domestic servants and laborers. Slavery in New York officially ended in 1827, though many Africans were forced to stay on as bound servants. The poem aptly calls them “half-free.” This is a part of our history that most white people would prefer to forget.

  There has been a tendency to think of slavery, that so-called peculiar institution, as a nineteenth-century cruelty rooted in the South. This has been the primary focus of many poems about slavery too. But Komunyakaa forces us to recall that it was also part of life in the North, part of the colonial history of our most cosmopolitan metropolis. It happened during the time when the city was changing from Dutch to British. He memorializes those people who lived in African dreams and North American realities, who were “dream-footed” even as “hard work rattled their bones.” “They danced Ashanti”—they kept alive and “danced” the traditional culture they had brought with them from the Gold Coast of Africa, what is now central Ghana.

  There is a transition in the poem where the speaker pauses to summarize: “They lived // & died.” He describes how they were buried (“Shrouded in cloth, in cedar / & pine coffins”) and where (“Trinity Church / owned them in six & a half acres // of sloping soil”). The word “owned” has poisonous power. The speaker’s bitterness about this history has thus far been kept at bay, but it breaks through as he describes how the land lapsed and the people were forgotten until “speculators” arrived:

  Did descendants & newcomers

  shoulder rock & heave loose gravel

  * * *

  into the landfill before building crews

  came, their guitars & harmonicas

  chasing away ghosts at lunch break?

  These are ghostly, hallowed grounds, and he wonders whether modern workers, or “building crews,” used music to chase away “ghosts.”

  The poem encapsulates a second history. In 1991, the city of New York began construction on a thirty-four-story federal office tower and adjoining four-story pavilion on lower Broadway. But workers stumbled upon intact human skeletal remains thirty feet under street level. A federally mandated archaeological dig subsequently uncovered a six-and-one-half-acre burial ground, which had been subsumed under decades of urban development and landfill. The African community in New York had created its own burial ground far from the city’s main one. This sacred space dates from the mid-1630s to 1795. Some fifteen thousand people are buried there.

  What ensued was a furious quarrel over this burial ground. As Spencer P. M. Harrington writes, “African-American outrage over the handling of the excavation stemmed from a perception that the black community had no control over the fate of its heritage—that decisions about the burial ground were being made by white bureaucrats with little insight into African-American history and spiritual sensitivities.” The site is now a national monument. It has been studied to give us a much fuller sense of African life—and death—in New York and elsewhere.

  The last lines of the poem are both telling and troubling:

  Soon, footsteps of lower Manhattan

  strutted overhead, back & forth

  between old denials & new arrivals,

  * * *

  going from major to minor pieties,

  always on the go. The click of heels

  the tap of a drum awaking the dead.

  It didn’t take long—“Soon”—for the modern city to return to business as usual. People are passing by this burial ground, rushing overhead without any awareness that they are treading on the graves of Africans. We think of people going “back & forth” between places, but Komunyakaa pairs the words “old” and “new” to suggest that they are passing to and fro in constant movement between “old denials & new arrivals.” The phrase “old denials” resonates with the long-standing American pattern of refusing to come to terms with the hard truths about slavery, the people brought to America against their will. Newcomers and others in the modern city are blissfully unaware of where they are treading. The speaker sardonically characterizes their daily lives, “going from major to minor pieties, / always on the go.” In their supercharged busy days, they rush unthinking through life.

  There is no comma at the end of the penultimate line; imagine an equal sign there. The passing by of pedestrians, “the click of heels,” is equated to “the tap of a drum awaking the dead.” People are literally walking above the burial ground, and Komunyakaa connects this to the tapping of a drum. He is referencing and summoning up the key place of the drum in traditional African communities, how it acts as a heartbeat, how it is used to communicate and make music, to contact the other world. Here the click of heels awakens the dead who have been sleeping for centuries in the ground below.

  Kate Daniels

  * * *

  “The Addict’s Mother: Birth Story”

  (2014–15)

  In her fifth book, In the Months of My Son’s Recovery, Kate Daniels writes about heroin addiction not from the point of view of a recovering addict but from the position of the addict’s mother. In other words, she situates herself in maternal relationship to addiction and recovery. She is well aware that the primary drama is not something that is happening to her—she is not her son—but she feels the collateral damage. She also feels somehow responsible—painfully close, helpless, guilt-ridden. She too is suffering—at one remove.

  The second section of the book is called “The Addict’s Mother.” Here is its second poem:

  The Addict’s Mother: Birth Story

  She wasn’t watching when they cut him

  Out. C-section, you know. Green drape

  Obscuring the mound of ripened belly

  They extracted him from. He spilled

  Out squalling, already starving. Still

  Stitching her up, they fastened him

  To her breast so he could feed. There

  He rooted for the milk, so lustful

  In his sucking that weeping roses

  Grew from the edges of her nipples.

  For weeks, they festered there,

  Blooming bloody trails anew each

  And every time he made a meal of her.

  I know what you’re thinking.

  But he was her child.

  She had to let him

  Do that to her.

  Daniels has always been a self-scrutinizing poet. Influenced by Sharon Olds, she is like Olds a personal poet, and she sometimes takes extra precautions to distance herself from the speaker of her poems. Hence the disclaimer to her book: “These poems are narrated by a character similar, but not identical, to myself . . .” This may be helpful psychologically to the poet and a useful reminder to the reader that the speaker in a poem is in some sense what Emily Dickinson called “a supposed person.” And yet Daniels does also give us a firsthand account of her family’s experience. She writes from the inside of the opioid epidemic. That’s not a fiction.

  “The Addict’s Mother” came out of Daniels’s own experience. She has verified that her son weighed 10.5 pounds at birth though he was born by C-section two weeks early, and he was such a voracious feeder that he wounded her just by trying to get a sip of milk. The poem began long after he had grown up, sta
rting with a hunch about the commingling of maternal love and bodily violence. Just as Thom Gunn decided to write about his mother’s suicide from a third-person point of view, so Daniels’s most consequential decision in this poem was to dramatize in the third person her own experience of giving birth. She almost treats it as something that has happened to someone else. There’s a certain alienation in the experience; the mother can’t see her child being pulled out of her.

  Formally speaking, this short free-verse poem consists of a single stanza of seventeen lines. The diction is informal and somewhat colloquial, but by capitalizing the first letter of each line Daniels also adds a certain quiet formality. As you reread the poem, notice how many sentences end just after the line itself ends and breaks. A single word (or words) hangs out there by itself at the line’s end. There is something unnerving in these slightly arrhythmic line breaks, which enact the discomfort of the experience the poet is describing. This jolt is heightened by the fact that each line begins with a touch of the formal.