Author Archives: khadakhada

Refugee

A little girl sleeps on the ground.
Her mother’s worry is her worry now.
Her hunger is her mother’s hunger.

Her brother and father are ghosts
remembered before the ground
swabs her tears unswallowed –

a voice throbs within: Home –
Somewhere, Somewhere, Not Here.
Does she understand her fate

she who embodies the hate of others,
brings Republicans frothing
into weird and coward alliance

with indifferent churchgoers who,
once again, mispledge their allegiance?

@Ken Hada, 2015

When O’Keeffe Found a Skull

the world did not change
but we did. Only we
could place a rose
where once a brain
responsive to instinct

dwelt just to be tamed.
Never have we understood
wildness bending us.
Gawking at the museum
or drifting

in the desert, bending
is the ultimate gesture.
Art is nothing
but bleaching sun,
the transfiguration

of wind recording
for the sake of time – sand
covering our feet, dead
gas deep in night – darkness
streaming as light.

first published in Concho River Review
vol. 29 no. 2, Fall 2015, p. 88

Are you the Uh …(poet)?

I arrived at Ada Jr. High School fifteen minutes early. I expected congested traffic, and I wasn’t exactly sure where to go. Surprisingly the parking lot and halls were relatively clear. I walked past the football team, heard the whistle shrilling, the coach exhorting, saw band members sauntering, carrying their instruments, a leering sun on their shoulders. I followed the “Visitors must check in” sign, approached the desk operated by a student and a professional. I introduced myself, then asked where I could find Ms. Wiest. The monitor looked at me, responded: “Are you the Uh … (“poet”, I fill in the word for her)?

Approximately 30 7th – 9th graders enter the library and arrange themselves in a standing/sitting semi-circle in order see my poems projected on the wall. This is an-after school writing group that voluntarily meets each Tuesday, much of it is about poetry. The students are well prepared. They have been given copies of 8 of my poems. They have looked at them before this meeting. They are sincere, attentive, thinking about something occurring to them they cannot quite articulate. But we all feel it.

We talk about their work, and mine. They ask simple, but also sophisticated questions. I read; they listen. They read; I listen. They tell me they write for “self-expression” and as one so delicately put it, “to cope.” Afterwards, many came up to me, one by one, with a photocopy of their “favorite” poem of mine, asking me to sign it. They also show me their writing. Nothing is quite so humbling as to have, for a second, a future in your hands.

This weekly meeting is voluntary on the part of the teachers and librarians who work there, dedicated, underappreciated professionals who go beyond what is expected, and at their expense, provide opportunities for something that poets like to call “transcendence.” As in so many states, education for the common good is increasingly under attack. The test-driven, official curriculum is traumatizing the human spirit. Legislators and/or ignorant and/or belligerent parents oversimplify most of the issues. Like so many places, there is not much room for exploration and creativity, despite all kinds of evidence that such activities significantly bolster, rather than detract from a serious education. I’m all for lab science and math and all the other survival skills and traditional subjects, especially history, if it is taught honestly and completely (a couple of these students had been to the Holocaust Museum in Dallas; I was impressed). But poetry does not deter from these subjects. In fact, we had a significant talk about my poem “Security Guard” (which they asked me to read, one I probably would not have volunteered). The discussion began with the Holocaust, but moved naturally to lingering implications of cultural oppression.

We need to have poetry in the schools because, for one reason among many, it moves us toward honesty and seriousness in all the rest of the curriculum. Students instinctively seek their soul, and when they don’t find it in standardized curriculum, they become disenchanted with school, deflating them during a significant portion of their developmental life. The social challenges they face become daunting with little release at school, or home. These teachers at Ada Jr. High, are making soul development possible.

I doubt if oil-plagued Oklahoma will ever get its resources adequately arranged for the best holistic education. There is so much mismanaged energy toward rushing ill-prepared students into the corporate work force, students who have never confronted their humanity, their essential sense of a developing self that cries out for affirmation and understanding. When we treat our local school systems as simply production lines for a labor force, really, in the long run, no one benefits, except maybe a small percentage at the top who might capitalize, then flea when skies darken. Contrary to the bleached, scaled-down approach to education, when students are given opportunity to seek self-understanding within their social and historical contexts, ironically they become more outward looking, gaining perspective of others. Self-aware students tend to be thoughtful about their society.

As I am leaving the campus, Ms. Wiest walks with me to the parking lot. I tell her the goal is not to produce Pulitzer Prize winners. Not everyone can do that (though this part of Oklahoma has indeed produced some pretty amazing writers over the years). The goal is for each of us to participate in the creative process. Even in reduced circumstances, we may find satisfaction within that greater conversation of self and others: Who are we? Who are my neighbors? What is our obligation to one another? Who cares? In a 1980 essay, Marvin Bell asked: “Is it wrong for people who can’t write well to write as well as they can?” Of course, the delightful irony is that the more our students write, the better they write, but even writing poorly (or in an incomplete or rough, or even juvenile manner) is better than not writing. One doesn’t have to be a great talent to embrace great issues, to find a responsible place in society. I don’t want to oversimplify the education budget issues in Oklahoma (or around the nation, for that matter), but one thing is clear. The problems with Oklahoma education are not the fault of the teachers.

Homecoming

for Uncle Max

Greed, I guess – my father answered
me uncharacteristically critical
of our ancestors, their impulsive
move to New Mexico Territory

stopping somewhere around Clayton
where nothing worked out. When
the horses died from grazing locoweed
they loaded their sparse selves in a wagon

and bleakly headed back to northwest
Oklahoma – the grass in those Gypsum
Hills green enough. They returned
to what they feared, reclaimed what they

knew, relinquished a short-lived dream
busted now like clods of red clay
crumbling to dust beneath a cattle herd.
It’s not easy to feed seven growing boys

so the toughest, Uncle Arnold, walked
back – herding the cattle as he made way
all those miles along unmarked paths
primal as a Kalahari Bushman – big boy,

keeper of the family’s future swaying,
stumbling, shitting slowly toward home
through cactus and redrock steadfast
under sun and stars close enough to touch.

Finalist for Spur Award, 2015
-first published in THIS LAND PRESS

Persimmon Sunday

I’m thrilled to be part of the Bicentennial Conference of North American Review, June 11-13
at the University of Northern Iowa. http://www.vpaf.uni.edu/events/nar/sessions.shtml#I

This poem will be there with me 🙂

Persimmon Sunday

I find them beneath my persimmon tree.

They quickly turn to go though
I don’t feel the need to be rough with them.
Fences are necessary, I suppose.
They can be meddlesome too.

These gentle folks pass every Sunday
to visit their boy in prison, they
only want to make a pie. I only want
to be asked first – a fence divides us.

She promises to bring me tarts
and that seems fair, and I think about
fairness and their son these days.
I am glad they go see him Sundays

and I tell them so. Their calm, courtesy
strikes me. Persimmon pie is part of her
autumn ritual, something I cannot deny
her. I don’t know, don’t need to know

how it is they got off the main road.
They are seeking the sweetness that comes
after the bitterness has ripened.
Standing under a tree none of us really own

I see her boy back home years ago
gleefully eating a piece of pie. I see
her husband proud, happy, the gleam
in her eye, sweet sticky juice sliding

down the boy’s dimpled cheeks,
dark eyes aglow as he wipes his mouth
with the sleeve of a flannel shirt
and I want it to be that way again,

want sour taste expunged. Afternoon
gathers and we talk about a hard,
killing frost that makes the sweetness,
a cold harsh night that ripens

this rustic fruit. We shake hands
and I don’t look back as I return
through fields where yellow leaves,
orange, dusty, scarlet and intense

lay about me, toss around me
in the breeze that carries ladybugs
unsuspecting toward their graves,
timber standing in reverent silence

as before a judge, as if to judge.
Truly autumn is the most dramatic
of days. It is a time to remember
but it is also a time to console.

©Ken Hada, 2014

The Moment Seizes Us

after Richard Linklater’s Boyhood

First let me say I’m glad Mason didn’t kill himself. I thought, at times,
that is where the film was going. Second, I’m comforted, and not surprised, that
the story moves and ends, at least for the moment, in the natural realm – in The
Big Bend under endless sky, alone with a few friends, looking up at eternal sky,
standing on solid rock howling a primal howl – a howl of catharsis – a yearning,
a cry to be, just to fucking be.

So much happens in this film but Nature, the constant, the glory of the
indifferent organic universe frames it and confirms the story. At the end, the new
friend says it best: “the moment seizes us” rather than all of our useless striving
to seize the moments, our futile attempts to control this magic called life.

So Texas, so America – so sad in a hopeful way, hopeful in a fearful way – makes
me feel guilty and broken – but relieved. It is our story: yours and mine, all of us
who have failed our children by trying to be happy.

Third, the kids, the young adults, the children who have been imperfectly raised
in an imperfect world by imperfect parents, in the end, choose to play the game.
They don’t check out. Though they see the hypocrisy, see through the emptiness,
the meaninglessness staring them in the face, they bravely choose to adapt and
survive. They go on, on their own terms. I admire this. Sure, some of their angst
is just evidence of the natural maturing process. Like their parents and their
parents’ parents, they rebel against the structures, then grow old and conform –
I’m sure that happens to us all on some level. But Mason, and his generation,
have seen more and survived in a new way, and in some ironic way, their
adaptation and survival is also ours, their imperfect predecessors. The future
is not over, and we don’t know what its final pages will read. But I’m proud of
them – they go on. They choose to face life. When things don’t make sense, they
go on, not unlike a Camus rebel of the absurd. And in their gentle and subtle
perseverance, the moments seize us. The moments seize us. What great news after
all.

Beautiful Nazis

In casual retrospection, we caricature Nazis, misunderstand evil.
But of course most Nazis were not ugly, devilish-looking monsters.
We must remember too many of them were handsome, young, virile,
charming good men whose nationalism – a prejudice or two – got
them into the most horrible plot in human history. Too many of them
were cultured, religious, rational, beautiful young men – loyal
and honorable – the kind a young lady would present to her family.
Bring one home for dinner, and all would be grace and wit – abiding
charm so long as the right kind were seated around the table, sipping
brandy in the parlor.

Two lessons: 1) A sinsiter trick of evil is that it often appears
beautiful. Beauty, order, grace, charm – all can be props for evil.
2) These attributes, in addition to loyalty, can be manipulated for
outcomes unimaginable.

Much is made of the Jewish conformity – resignation – herded like
sheep to slaughter – “perfect victims” Elie Wiesel describes them.
But not enough is made of the conformity of young German (and
Hungarian) men, who also perfectly resigned themselves to follow
the voices of destruction: 1) the strong threatening voice or
2) the sweet, seductive voice (as Erich Fromm expertly analyzes
in The Heart of Man).

Sand Plums on the Canadian River

He walks the lesser part of day
along the river’s path slipping
through shifting sand, eyes
pierced for plumpest, ripest

picks. His face is course, his
fingers hard, he squints away
the western sun – a pail of plums
half full, Meadowlarks in flight.