Poems by Judy Wyatt

Judy Wyatt is a psychotherapist, living and working in San Francisco. She has felt compelled to write poetry since she was six.

Embrace the Falling Sky

You know the neighbors will
throw trash in the street
which you will pick up.
Strangers will call frantic for help,
then fail to send in the check. Our third book
will join the remains of the others in the closet.
People will slide into fascism
complacent as if riding
an airport walkway,
lugging the earth behind.

You become the shut door of a language
I can't speak.
After days, I panic,
dare to knock.
Your eyes glance up, feral and white, as if
lost in a hospital corridor with
the machinery of pain. You are
a cocked gun trying not to go off,
and I am the trigger finger.

Unknowingly I
whine like your mother, that time
she tripped over her feet,
breaking her leg, and you,
a sour 5-year-old,
called your dad, then the doctor,
reassuring and hating her.
Unknowingly the eyes
you have put on
are the cold ones I erased,
my uncle's stony slits
while his bone hands fucked me,
my mother's gloating as she
forced my arms into
a hated sweater,
her voice sickly with twisted
good intent.

I've learned to love her in you,
your inept mom
too timid for rage,
abandoned to psychiatrists,
conspired against,
no movement then to cling to,
silenced with drugs.
As you've learned to respect
the immigrant girl who raised me,
outfacing her company boss,
pounding rage into cookies,
unable to remember
the pogrom, the shot, the murdered father
who dropped her as he fell.

In you I've learned to love the horror
that creeps up a man's throat, from which
the words for feeling have been
swabbed clean, as though the tongue
were severed -- my father,
his shirtsleeves on
the drafting board he hated,
my uncle, turning his
cringing, phony smile
to his brothers, partners
in business and betrayal.

All this is hard to remember.
We fall back into
the masks of ancestors,
faced off grandly in the kitchen,
their smoking guns in our hands, until
our will to know each other
calls us back
across the oceans, from the foreign names.
We pull off the too big robes
of ceremony, watch
those centuries collapse.
Now we are naked. Nothing left
but orphans to enter
this puzzle of shattered sky,
who blink and fall
into each other
again and again,
everything taken away
but what we need.

Click to read two more poems.

Dust

Copyright 1996 by Judy Wyatt

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