Last night, our friends at Karma hosted Freddy Frankel as he read from In a Stone's Hollow (Fairweather, 2007).
After retiring as head of psychiatry at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital a dozen years ago, Freddy studied poetry, joined a writers workshop, and started writing poems, many drawn from notes he'd made as a young man fighting the Nazis. (He'd left medical school to volunteer to serve in the South African Army, lying about his age to get in.) The poems resulting from opening his wartime notebook again sixty years later "reflect a collaboration of the self I am with the self I was."
In less than an hour, this fine poet imparted a comprehensive history of South Africa, relayed his own journey from his homeland to Boston, and held a packed room motionless as he read...except for when we were crying.
It's become a custom to shout a slogan at the end of Freddy's readings: "Freddy rocks!" He does. At 84 and no doubt he will at 104. He told me that he'd just seen a show of 18 portraits of "super-centenarians" - people over 110, one of whom finished his Ph.D. at 106!
Here's one poem (in the language of poetry, a villanelle) that I loved:
15 March 1945
The Appenines
Should God have quit Creation on day five,
those birds, those waters spellbound in the bay!
Men hunting men in mountains to survivewe ask for mercy as we run, shrivel
under cover while bullets ricochet.
Should God have quite Creation on day five--day six He made a man, so sure he'd thrive;
now look, we bag torn body parts each day,
men hunting men in mountains to survive!Some luckless soldiers won't get out alive,
still young they'll change back to dirt and clay.
Should God have quite Creation on day five.In he widespread killing, the snowfall driven,
peace drags, sinking on its unploughed way--
men hunting men in mountains to surviveunder this hell's dome. I've panicked and I've
embraced Him, cursed Him for this blood-iron fray.
Should God have quit Creation on day five,
men hunting men in mountains to survive.
