POEM
A Son with a Future
When he was four years old, he stood at the window during a
thunderstorm. His father, a tailor, sat on the table sewing.
He came up to his father and said, “I know what makes
thunder: two clouds knock together.”
When he was older, he recited well-known rants at parties.
They all said that he would be a lawyer.
At law school he won a prize for an essay. Afterwards, he
became the chum of an only son of rich people. They
were said to think the world of the young lawyer.
The Appellate Division considered the matter of his disbarment.
His relatives heard rumours of embezzlement.
When a boy, to keep himself at school, he had worked in a
drug store.
Now he turned to this half-forgotten work, among perfumes
and pungent drugs, quiet after the hubble-bubble of the
courts and the search in law books.
He had just enough money to buy a drug store in a side
street.
Influenza broke out. The old tailor was still keeping his shop
and sitting cross-legged on the table sewing, but he was
half-blind.
He, too, was taken sick. As he lay in bed he thought, “What a
lot of money doctors and druggists must be maiking; now
is my son’s chance.”
They did not tell him that his son was dead of influenza.
From The Poems of Charles Reznikoff by Charles Reznikoff, Edited by Seamus Cooney. Reprinted by permission of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright 2005 by Charles Reznikoff.
Source: Poems 1918-1975: The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff (Black Sparrow Press, 1977)
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