Hilde Weisert
Happy October, everyone. Here in the Northeast, it really feels like fall, with chilly mornings and evenings coming all too quickly. It’s time to curl up by the fire with a good book and nice cup of tea – or to open your computer and scroll through pages like this one.
We have an interesting poet to introduce to you today – one who is not afraid to tackle the difficult subjects, as you will see when you read her poems.
C0-winner of the 2017 Gretchen Warren Award from the New England Poetry Club and winner of the 2016 Tifferet Journal Poetry Award, Hilde Weisert has held fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. When she lived in New Jersey, she was a Geraldine R. Dodge Poet and edited Teaching for Delight: Ways of Doing Poetry in Schools, published by the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Project. She now lives in Sandisfield, Massachusetts and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
The Scheme of Things, her full-length poetry collection, was published in 2015 by David Robert Books, with a mysteriously beautiful abstract cover by Jim Haba, whom many of you know as the beloved former director of the Dodge Poetry Festival. With Dr. Elizabeth Stone, she co-edited an anthology, Animal Doctors, Animal People: Poems, essays and stories on our essential connection, published by the Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph, 2012.
It’s a pleasure to share with you the three poems below by Hilde Weisert. “To Ilona, My Stepmother” and “Questions for Our Mothers” appeared in the 2017 anthology Writing Fire: An Anthology Celebrating the Power of Women’s Words, published by Green Fire Press. “The Certainty of Others” is from The Scheme of Things.”
—Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
To Ilona, My Step-mother
How did you stand my father?
The tantrums that drove my mother
to tears, to drink, to leave?
The red face and clenched fists
I mirrored at twenty-one, squared off
across a room, standing up to him —
didn’t scare you. You laughed
as if he were a child.
How did you know he was?
Was it the actual war you’d lived through,
or just being a Hungarian
instead of a Swede? I don’t know
what he deserved. I do know
you were more than I did,
loving that difficult man
until the end, bringing together
the broken family – a daughter,
a son, a father – in your home.
My question began as a joke,
but now, remembering,
I think you deserve more.
Ilona, if you will tell me,
I will listen…
How did you stand my father?
The Certainty of Others
“…The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore…”
— Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
Soon we are to leave this year, and century, a crossing
my grandmother made as a young woman – but she was brave,
hands eager on the rail, eyes brimming as a new continent
wheeled its great machine into view, the New York World
copper and a rising dome, the new shapes a skyline.
Was there no one she loved in that old wooden land,
no one to make her feel that what she left
was not behind an ocean, but below?
I fear for those who stayed, how they can go on so far
from where we rise now on the new world’s turning…
And yet lower Manhattan is always lovely from the Heights:
The white choirs my father down from Dartmouth saw in ’29.
As late as ’68, dragging home winter grocery sacks, my roommate
caught a glimpse of the Singer tower and thought it was a Christmas tree on fire.
I don’t remember when they took the Singer down.
It is only Brooklyn, and the lesser river, yet standing here
I feel that it is time we look across, and that this briny island
has sailed us in, the salt wind of a century on our faces.
But it is Brooklyn. I see the ferries run again, the white wakes
returning home. And behind, it is only a century leaving us.
Questions for Our Mothers
What we haven’t asked.
What we don’t,
or can’t, ask now,
except on a page.
What we imagine they knew
but didn’t say. (How do you say
such things to a child?)
If they are dead,
we imagine they know
everything, and would tell
the women we’ve become
if we find the right words
at a certain time of night.
If they are alive, we grab this chance
for a different kind of conversation.
Of course, they did know everything.
Of course, we never asked them much
except for what we needed.
Now what we need has changed.
***
All those years I asked “Who were you?”
to the mysterious woman in the photograph,
when what I really wanted to know was,
“What does who you were make me?”
No wonder you didn’t answer.
This time, let the question be real.
Tell me about that other woman –
the you who has nothing to do with me.