Greed: Winter, 2001

I was raised by my family to be greedy:
my father’s great quiet, my mother’s flood
of feeling—a secret, after my father was gone—
her words pealing one by one; an autoharp’s
tingling song.

                       He was lavish with the written word
only, pouring the poetry of King James—all those begats,
the long lists of sons, the occasional daughter’s name
among them—out of his mouth.

                                              Or, Merlin’s words,
just as they should be in his magician-voice, vibrate,
the rustling of reeds. And, the Wart’s boy-words:
his quick leaps, into trees, the water, into the sky;
fish-voice, falcon-voice, the slow speech of
stones toll that same deep resonance in the bell
of the mind.

                       Oh, the play, the wild hope
words hold in their timbre, overtones, the widening
circles of sound—like yesterday—December—
when I’m walking my daily path; the little girl
pumping her swing, all the force of her legs
and back pressing hard into an arc in the air—
the father motionless, alone, in the car—
shouting, Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
as she flies higher, and higher.

Note: “The Wart” was King Arthur’s boyhood nickname, given him by his jealous foster brother, Kay, in “The Sword in the Stone,” the first section of T.H.White’s The Once and Future King, which my father read to my brother, sister and I when we were small children. He also attempted to read the whole of the Bible to us with less success.

Anne Becker

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