Over at normblog, Gene Zitver, a contributer to Harry’s Place, reveals that his favourite poem is Autumn Begins In Martins Ferry, Ohio by James Wright. I’d never heard of it so I looked it up.
It’s in free verse and from a quick Googling I suspect it’s a popular subject for English assignments in US high schools. It’s a very short musing on the lives of working people in a steel town in Ohio. It goes like this
Autumn Begins In Martins Ferry, Ohio In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home. Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love. Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.
