Arnold Richards
It’s no secret – and certainly not to the readers of these pages – that psychoanalysts are deeply interested in poetry. For that reason, our featured poet this month, the Editor-in-Chief of International Psychoanalysis, should not be a total surprise. The best response to a poem, it has been said, is another poem, and Arnold Richards is one whose response to poems is immediate and sensitive.
His professional role is familiar to many of you. Editor of JAPA (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association) from 1994 to 2003 and the author of numerous books and papers in the field, he is currently a Training and Supervising Analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He was awarded a 2000 Mary F. Sigourney Award and gave the 50th Annual Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture.
The three poems that follow are from a book published this year by Kamac Books in London and edited by Salman Akhtar. The title couldn’t be more appropriate: Between Hours: A Collection of Poems by Psychoanalysts.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Father’s Day
My father had a stubble beard
a crippled gait, a sad face, a quiet voice
My father had a troubled life.
Mother died before her time.
Brother struck by Cossack blade.
Father carried the body home.
Sister shot in dark ravine.
A world destroyed, A god that failed.
My father grew old. His hair turned white.
A wrinkled suit wrapped his frame,
He walked home.
Stooped, returned to wife
Bandit waited in darkened hall
Blood unstopped stained the wall.
My father had a troubled life,
a crippled gait, a stubble beard
a sad face, a quiet voice
A troubled life
And then he died.
For My Much Younger Sister on the Occasion of Her Birthday
Shall I mark your birthday when you did not mark mine?
We both started in same space but at the wrong time.
I too soon. You too late.
You Sara’s gift.. I a mistake
Down the same canal. Greeted by the same face
Brought to the same place.
Crowded and cluttered rooms with little view.
Windows covered with damask opaque to leaves and sky
Furniture covered with plastic.
Transparent in pattern shielding texture from the feel of sticky fingers
yours and mine.
We both ate In the same kitchen. Sanitas on the walls,
linoleum on the floor
Fox Ubet Chocolate MyT Fine
We shared space and place faced but not time.
I came to love the man who also made us both.
You were taught otherwise.
Who cut our ties of birth?
I am our father’s son.
You are our mother’s child.
Elegy for Muriel
You celebrated your self
and rightly so.
You reveled in your senses,
pampered them with aliment
sonatas and sauces
flavorful.
You tuned your body
Sharpened its sensuality
prepared for its adornment,
clothes your advertisement.
You wrote your own
jacket copy
prideful
before your
fall.
Muriel Weinstein, PhD, died two summers ago. She fell off a mountain in Switzerland, where she loved to climb.