Poem: Let my people

Let my people

By Patrick T. Reardon

 

 

(1 – NOW)

 

Lucy Richardson, stuck for words, types the

Odyssey (Fitzgerald translation) outside

fortress Cook County Jail, at a folding

tea table set up in the bus stop haven,

her frail portable typewriter, once owned

by a minor Chicago politician, clack-clicking

into the empty morning and on the breeze

for inmates in the exercise yard to irritably

ponder.

 

She is a quick, brown-from-the-sun typist,

ex-ing out typos, leaving her page filled

with thick black lines amid Homer’s

(Fitzgerald’s) words — hitting the keys

hard, like an angry pianist, turning her

8½ x 11 into a two-sided dispatch to the

far Cosmos, one side, the Greeks and

Trojans, the other, a Braille of infinite

jest.

 

Find favor. A cry on high.

 

Lucy Richardson piles her labored pages into

a thick cardboard box, modern treasure

chest, and, each night, ignites the harmless

paper in her backyard barbecue pit altar —

roasting commercial red hots on long thin

forks.

 

*

 

His name is No One.  Her name is Wondrous.

Here I am.

 

*

 

One-Cent travels an underground el train,

his journey an unraveling.  Beside him on

the blue-plastic bench, difficult to mar —

at the end of the car away from the smell —

sits a friend of math and faith, Salvador

Smith, quietly crooning the Lullaby of

Riptide.

 

 

I rise up and go.

 

Jutting from an unzippered pocket in

Smith’s backpack — the new edition of

Randall’s Sin Census, a directory (with

maps) of all the brothels in Chicago, all

the gambling dens, all the bait-and-switch

artists, the tax cheats, the speeders, the

drivers-wrong-way down one-way streets,

the tellers of lies to young children, the

CEOS, the scammers, the trash-throwers,

the poor, the human relations-ists, the

mean-spirited, the intelligent, the kind

fools, the inconveniencers, the bullies,

the irritated and the irritables, the lazies,

the searchers-after-truth, the sad, the

rebutters, the deplored, the illegal parkers,

the comfortable, the shunned, the slow,

the trespassers, the snubbers, the lost,

the enthusiastic, forgotten and all the

others.

 

Flipping through the book, One-Cent finds

himself on pages 117, 344 and 521.  He looks

up Lucy Richardson in the index and sees a list

of seven pages. Salvador Smith is one of the

compilers. Denmark Jones is nowhere to be

found.

 

*

 

Let my people.

 

*

 

The tall daughter of the Governor looks like

him — told often enough, even now, cruel

truth.

 

She is at the edges of groups, looming, and, in

the end, they tell her, please, sit down and run

things.

 

The flight of a bird, dawn.

 

In the halls of marble government, she is

Lady Lovingkindness. No dopey pushover,

she dances with numbers, harmonizes anyone’s

song, can carry a tune.  Has a talent for lonely

joy.

 

*

 

Engage in congress.

 

*

 

Child of the Century closes his eyes to listen

now

 

to the screaming animal, now as Century

Child invades deeper into his own mountain

labyrinth, now as the well-fed, sleepy guards,

have been evaded, but not all, not all

— now,

 

down the cave line, past the echo cavern,

hearing on humid air the unseen roars of

angry suffering and astonishment — seeing

now

 

the alley bread loaf softening in on itself,

soggy with surrender after hard night rain

— now

 

as the sun moves sideways in the blameless

sky, as the water bug skitters a lost

Shakespeare sonnet across the meek kitchen

linoleum.

 

Drop-of-blood ruby.

Noisome spirit sent.

 

Child treasures the tiny diamond of anger,

embedded in his broken elbow (not his elbow,

but let’s call it that), the small blue flame,

fuel of revolt, escape, survival — scathed but

breathing.

 

*

 

Frozen nettle and shepherd’s purse,

sweet william, ladysmock, muscular

wort and flower-cup fern.

 

 

*

 

GirlJane on stage with unaccountable

hits of Gregorian Chants interwoven —

alternating lines — with lost-love bubble

gum, gospel and Universe death, the bassist

plucking his stand-up with huge fingers of

huge hands, Uriah-Heepish (although no

toad) —

 

the floor before her: upturned spotlight

faces that GirlJane wants to walk across

like Jesus over water, like a little poor monk

crazy with faith, like naked in the falling

snow.

 

Let us now.

 

GirlJane remembers at the corner of

thought the laundromat like the inside of a

bell.

 

 

*

 

I propose a parable:

A birthright bargain or a vulture promise?

 

*

 

Foreign to his neighbors, foreign to his family,

Denmark Jones is a temporary resident, here

today —

 

without a song, in the still of the night, after

all, from here to eternity, for no one, in the

wee small hours, over the rainbow, with every

breath, with a little help, here there and

everywhere —

 

and he has no documents, bivouacs with

the Army of Sufferers, reads the dead

woman’s books found in an abandoned

basement on an abandoned block, and

once sacked the quarterback with utter

abandon.

 

*

 

O, happy day!

 

*

 

As Hambone watched:

 

The books were opened, and fire

flew. Words blazed. A river of flames,

a thick line of letters, the scripture of

truth and hope. Let the outraged fall

silent.

 

As people are now.

 

The sparrow prophecy is altogether

reliable. The sparrow visions the

deeper text. Hears deeper rhythms.

Be still. Leave your anger at the

door.

 

All peoples, nations, and languages

ask what the Trojan women will say.

What white pains will tell. Each one’s

portion of fire, each one’s count of

days. The wonder of all things, all

breathing.

 

As Hambone watched:

 

Tell no lie. Wear your face.

 

 

 

(2 – BEFORE)

 

Make music with thrones and

dominations, with principalities

and powers, with cherubim, with

virtues, with guards and seraphim.

Shout praise, lift high. Sing!

A light and a fire burning always.

 

On a firefly evening, late August,

past dusk, heavy air on the breeze,

birds on the wing, shadows against the

indigo sky, dotted with tiny solid sparks

— One-Cent in sideyard dark

away from the driveway toys and

the snap-giggles, snap-roars

of many others, younger in stair steps

down to the toddler,

babies inside in bed.

 

Unseen by bike boys — Denmark Jones

and Child of the Century — slaloming

past, southbound on California.

 

The Governor’s daughter, not yet tall,

an infant two hundred miles to the south

in the capital, and GirlJane not to arrive

for six more years.

 

In a Texas Gulf town with a Latin name,

Hambone is shoeless in the still warm sand.

 

A summer school nun in River Forest,

clicking off another degree like slamming

another double down the right field line,

opens a copy of the new Odyssey translation

by Robert Fitzgerald for her Great Books

course and writes her name with admirable

penmanship on the title page where, in a

different century, Lucy Richardson sees it as

she begins typing a full copy of the book

before the eyeless walls of Cook County Jail.

 

On the radio through the open window,

One-Cent can hear Judy Garland sing

about the strings of her heart.

Listen, the trumpets!

Listen, the trombones slide!

 

 

 

(3 – LATER)

 

Behind the singer, ceiling to floor,

a six-by-six space-black cloth,

gold-spangled, a rent in the fabric.

 

George Green Lightning,

august in his humility,

singing the saga of the St. Louis war,

the lullaby of original ways,

as diners dine on free-range chicken.

 

Outside, in the night,

Child of the Century hunter-gathers

Chicago alleys for bottles, cans and

odd pieces of metal,

murmuring an infant tune about

the wheels on the bus something,

something.

 

Dawnbreak and he is returned

to the basement flat,

laying himself down and

hearing Lucy change the laundry

in the common area by the back door.

 

Up the porch stairs to the third-floor studio,

her apartment in the air,

her lease amid the winds,

she tells herself to have no fear

and whispers her aunt’s immigrant prayer:

 

Whatever is wet, whatever is soil,

whatever is flowered, whatever is empty,

whatever is cement, whatever is bark.

 

Across the street,

a billboard for GirlJane’s show

at the Amphitheatre last month.

 

To the west, the expressway

cars, trucks sparkling in rising sun —

Hambone dozes in the Uber to O’Hare,

dreaming of seven clustered clouds,

an orchestra of suspicious rhythms and

the Church of One Thousand Sinners.

The twin passes in the southbound lanes.

 

One-Cent dances with the Silk Goddess.

He blesses recalcitrant cattle and

throws dice with the lost priests.

He kneels before the Holy Chalice

at the Little Flower side altar.

 

If there is any skin and

if there is anything worthy of impulse.

 

Denmark Jones writes

songs in his head no one will hear.

 

 

Patrick T. Reardon

1.21.26

 

“Let my people” originally appeared in Long Poem Magazine, Issue 34, Winter 2025.  You can find a note about this poem here:https://patricktreardon.com/essay-the-writing-of-the-poem-let-my-people/ .

 

The images accompanying this poem are from Children’s Games by Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted in 1560.