AN APPRECIATION OF MURIEL RUKEYSER, “ST. ROACH”
St. Roach (c. 1973)
For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,
for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,
they showed me by every action to despise your kind;
for that I saw my people making war on you,
I could not tell you apart, one from another,
for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,
for that all the people I knew met you by
crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling
water on you, they flushed you down,
for that I could not tell one from another
only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.
Not like me.
For that I did not know your poems
And that I do not know any of your sayings
And that I cannot speak or read your language
And that I do not sing your songs
And that I do not teach our children
to eat your food
or know your poems
or sing your songs
But that we say you are filthing our food
But that we know you not at all.
Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.
You were lighter than the others in color, that was
neither good nor bad.
I was really looking for the first time.
You seemed troubled and witty.
Today I touched one of you for the first time.
You were startled, you ran, you fled away
Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch.
I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.
I heard Muriel Rukeyser read her poems aloud twice, once in 1976, once in 1978. The first reading took place in a long narrow room on the top floor of the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. She was presenting with Gerald Stern, who had recently hired me for my first job in Pennsylvania Poets in the Schools, and he invited me to tag along. I hadn’t been to many poetry readings yet—I have subsequently put in my ten thousand hours—and I was overexcited by the crowd. I recall that Rukeyser looked stately but not vigorous, and slightly tilted, I suppose, if you knew how to look—I didn’t—since she had suffered a few small strokes over the past decade. She seemed grandly old to me—she was sixty-three—and had a face shaped like an oversized heart. I was carrying my copy of (1973) because I loved her poem “Despisals.” I wouldn’t have had the language to describe it then, but I must have intuited how it filters Martin Buber through Walt Whitman to come up with a personal ethos. It’s a sort of “I and Thou” for the American poet of difference:
