Robin Becker
Monday October 13, 2014 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Emmanuel Sigauke
Robin Becker, Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, is the author of seven poetry collections, including Domain of Perfect Affection, The Horse Fair, Giacometti’s Dog, and All-American Girl, winner of the Lambda Literary Award. In 2002 the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh published Venetian Blue, a limited-edition chapbook of Becker’s art poems. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 she received the George W. Atherton III Award for Excellence in Teaching from Penn State, and from 2010 to 2011 she served as the Penn State Laureate. For the Women’s Review of Books, Becker edits poetry and writes a column on poetry called “Field Notes.”
Old Florida
When the soon-to-be famous hurricane
hurried to their neighborhood, I begged them
to leave. Rain made a cassoulet of the parking lot;
winds juggled giant palms like rolling pins;
shy herons took cover beneath awnings
and stood like museum guards in doorways—
but my parents hunkered down, children
under desks in the 50s, the storm their personal blitz.
I cried, I screamed over the phone but they rejected
the generator-backed shelter I found, chose canned
goods and bunker, until the phone died— and I consigned them
to their neighbors, their luck, their blood-thinners.
Eighty-seven years old, they hid on the ninth floor,
elevator out, infrastructure crumbling, but more
than death or thirst they feared their daughter
with her talk of evacuation.
Leaving home, even for natural disaster, made them
refugees, registrants in a vast and subtly
documented conspiracy to remove them
from their apartment to assisted living.
Neighbors found them sweating in their foxhole,
ferried batteries, salami and ice,
and when the power came back, they phoned
to report that hardship brought out the kindness
in people, wasn’t it fortunate they stayed in their home?
And where was my faith in human goodness?
