Weariness of Men

By Frank Stanford 1948–1978 Frank Stanford

My grandmother said when she was young

The grass was so wild and high

You couldn’t see a man on horseback.

In the fields she made out

Three barns,

Dark and blown down from the weather

Like her husbands.

She remembers them in the dark,

Cursing the beasts,

And how they would leave the bed

In the morning,

The dead grass of their eyes

Stacked against her.

Estate of Frank Stanford © C.D. Wright

Source: You (Lost Road Publishers, 1979)

Biography

Born in 1948, Stanford was a prolific poet known for his originality and ingenuity. He has been dubbed “a swamprat Rimbaud” by Lorenzo Thomas and “one of the great voices of death” by Franz Wright. He grew up in Mississippi, Tennessee, and then Arkansas, where he lived for most of his life and wrote many of his most powerful poems. He attended the University of Arkansas from 1967-9 and studied engineering while continuing to . . .

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