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Posts Tagged ‘shel silverstein’

Poetic Lineage

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 9, 2024| 11 Comments »


 
Thank you Alice Ungerer,
for raising young children
alone in Alsace
after your husband died.
It could not have been easy,
especially during the German occupation.
Hard enough to raise one child,
much less four, even when
the world is at peace.
 
It’s no surprise your son Tomi
grew up to write political satire
considering how the Wehrmacht
requisitioned your home.
Is it strange for me to tell you, his mother,
I’m grateful he wrote erotica, too?
Did you know? Did he tell you?
Not that I’ve read it,
just that I know this is how he met
a Jewish man who grew up
poor in Chicago, son of immigrants
who ran a bakery that failed,
a man who became a cartoonist
for an erotic magazine.
 
Not that I’ve seen his erotic cartoons,
but they must have caught
your son’s interest because
he urged that man, Shel,
to start drawing for kids.
For kids. An erotic cartoonist.
Can you imagine?
Your son dragged him kicking
and screaming into the office
of Ursula Nordstrom,
an editor at Harper & Row,
who thought your son was right.
 
And Ursula encouraged Mr. Silverstein
to make books for kids like me,
poetry books in which terrible things happened
but playfulness was always possible,
even when the little blue engine
who looked up at the hill
crashed, even when the little girl
who didn’t get her pony
died, even when the man
who fell in love with a bagpipe
ended up lonely and alone.
 
And because your son encouraged Shel,
I read those books and laughed
and learned that poetry was fun
and the process was full of pleasure
even when the stakes were high.
Even when I write about the girl
who didn’t think she was good enough.
Even when I write about how the whole cherry crop
was ruined in one minute by hail.
Even when I write about the woman
whose son took his life.
 
Oh Alice Ungerer,
dear woman I will never know,
your life is so integral to mine.
I don’t know the color
of your hair or the aches
of your heart or what made
you leap up in joy, but
your choices have touched my life
so profoundly, and I thank you
for how my sensibilities have opened
into a longing to turn
toward the dark underbelly
and find a way not just to look there
but to play. I don’t know if you
can receive this, but I thank you, dear Alice,
great grandmother of my words.

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