The poet is Joshua Michael Stewart.
FOR MY BROTHER ON WHAT WOULD’VE BEEN HIS FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY
His greatest joy was to pin my arms
to the floor with his knees
and fart in my face.
The day he pushed me and I slammed my head
on a nail jutting out of the wall,
he full-blown blubbered
all the way to the hospital—
it was my greatest revenge.
For years we didn’t speak.
He spent much of that time
sleeping in abandoned houses,
with a habit of pulling a revolver
on his friends and squeezing
the trigger just to hear the click
and his own laughter.
He smirked
when I arrived to see how gaunt he’d become,
the slightest flash of tooth,
knowing I knew he was dying.
Always ready to fight the world,
when he needed a cane
he chose one that sheathed
a blade in its handle.
And when there was nothing left to say
and I told him I had to go,
he wrapped his arms around my neck
and I could feel his ribs through the flannel.
~~~~~~~
This poem made me burst into tears—it bullied me into crying.
When a joke succeeds, we laugh out loud at the end.
No matter how annoying it was until the punchline, no matter what analysis or scholarship may say, is not the successful poem measured this way—except at the end comes not laughter, but tears?
My tears chose this as a “great poem Scarriet found on Facebook.”
What more can the critic say?
Strangely, there is more to say, because when I went to open this poem to copy it out, I discovered I had accidentally assumed the poem was the same as copied above. The last part of the poem was cut off when I first perused it. It turned out the poem had four more lines!
as he heaved and wept,
the way he did
in the backseat of our father’s Pontiac
when he held that blood-warm towel to my face.
In my reading (perhaps understandably), I find these last four lines, discovered newly, completely unnecessary. They ruin the effect for me. The ‘saying goodbye’ moment pushed me over the edge; this: “he wrapped his arms around my neck.”
I don’t want to hear anything more. Then it becomes not the brother’s poem, but the poet’s—who is re-capping the experience and adding details I don’t need: “Pontiac,” “blood-warm towel.”
And it is the brother’s poem.
There are a few poems like this: the subject is the poem; the poem, remarkably, is not the poet’s. These poems are often the most moving poems of all.
The brother wrote the poem, just as Milton wrote “Paradise Lost” and God did not.