Two Generations Of Pulitzers...
This past month, Franz Wright was gfiven a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 32 years ago his father, who died in the early 1980s, was also given a Pulitzer for Poetry. Here are some of their works...
A Blessing
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl‚s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.                                                                                                                                                              -James Wright                                                                                   
Two Postures beside a Fire
1
Tonight I watch my father‚s hair,
As he sits dreaming near his stove.
Knowing my feather of despair,
He sent me an owl‚s plume for love,
Lest I not know, so I‚ve come home.
Tonight Ohio, where I once
Hounded and cursed my loneliness,
Shows me my father, who broke stones,
Wrestled and mastered great machines,
And rests, shadowing his lovely face.
2
Nobly his hands fold together in his repose.
He is proud of me, believing
I have done strong things among men and become a man
of place among men of place in the cities.
I will not awaken him.
I have come home alone, without wife or child
To delight him. Awake, solitary and welcome,
I too sit near his stove, the lines
of an ugly age scarring my face, and my hands
Twitch nervously about.                                                                            -James Wright    

                                                              
Domesticity

Gray little clumps weightless as hair dust what is it 

Forty years later
utterly unrecognizable
save for our eyes that is, were we to meet                               

- Franz Wright

                                                                                              
Old Story  

First the telephone went,
then
the electricity.  It was cold,
and they both went to sleep
as though dressed for a journey. Like addictions condoned
from above evening
fell, lost leaves waiting
to come back as leaves˜
the long snowy divorce. . . That narrow bed, a cross
between an altar
and an operating table. Voice saying, While I was alive
I loved you.
And I love you now.                                                                                                                                                      -Franz Wright