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Box of Cigars

By Gerald Stern b. 1925 Gerald Stern

I tried one or two but they were stale

and broke like sticks or crumbled when I rolled them

and lighting a match was useless nor could I

put them back in the refrigerator—

it was too late for that—even licking them

filled my mouth with ground-up outer leaf,

product of Lancaster or eastern Virginia,

so schooled I am with cigars, it comes in the blood,

and I threw handfuls of them into the street

from three floors up and, to my horror, sitting

on my stoop were four or five street people

who ran to catch them as if they were suddenly rich,

and I apologize for that, no one should

be degraded that way, my hands were crazy,

and I ran down to explain but they were smoking

already nor did I have anything to give them

since we were living on beans ourselves, I sat

and smoked too, and once in a while we looked

up at the open window, and one of us spit

into his empty can. We were visionaries.

Gerald Stern, "Box of Cigars," from American Sonnets, published by W.W. Norton. Copyright 2002 by Gerald Stern. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Source: Poetry (October 2001).

Biography

Gerald Stern has been called an “American original,” “a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary,” and, by his friend Stanley Kunitz, “the wilderness in American poetry.” Over dozens of books, and decades of teaching and activism, Stern has emerged as one of America’s most celebrated and irascible poets. “If I could choose one poem of mine to explain my stance,” Stern told Contemporary Poets, “it would be ‘The One Thing in . . .

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