Day 6: "Though Pink-Tinged Glasses" by Hal Sirowitz

Day 6 of 30 Days of The Five-Two features "Through Pink-Tinged Glasses" by former Queens poet laureate Hal Sirowitz, with audio reading by Bob Holman.

Feel free to join the tour with a comment, tweet, or blog post of your own. Here's the schedule.

Day 25: Ian Khadan

For Day 25 of 30 Days of The 5-2, contributor Ian Khadan returns:

BRICK CITY

after Hal Sirowitz
a bop for Newark, NJ

In the year of bricks, these brick-
ward galaxy cowboys roll deep
through city trenches smooth as double—
dutch on asphalt. They metronome
the streets with Gatling ratchets; spokes
rattling clean the air of its body bag.

There'll be blood on every stoop
'til all firstborn sons get bodied.

In the city of bricks, the watchers
toke hammer and gunpowder; them
boys mark territory like Mason-Dixon:
poverty from prowess, commuters
from commoners gentrified like
slave barracks from plantation.
We all gotta’ eat, and ain't nothing
stopping these bullets but blues.

There'll be blood on your block
'til all them boys get bodied.

Them train movin' devils watch
us like we an aquarium and we
piranha for ‘em so they can hold
their jaws open long after the 'burbs
call them back to their beds:
belly-warmers souvenir’d in their eyes.

There will be blood on these streets
'til this whole city gets bodied.

IAN KHADAN is a curator of poetry events in New York City. He's author of the upcoming chapbook, The Kaieteur Fall. Find him on twitter @iankhadan and at www.iankhadan.com

Day 24: Ian Khadan

5-2 alum Ian Khadan ("Stickup Kids") discusses Hal Sirowitz's "Through Pink-Tinged Glasses" on Day 24 of 30 Days of The 5-2. —Gerald So


Sirowitz’s Lovely Intrusion

A friend once told me a story about her parents. She said her father would walk twelve miles every day to go see her mother, "and you're crying about a twenty minute bus ride to get here?" The point she was trying to make was lost on me in that moment. I was enamored with the love story I’d just heard and as the years, since passed, embellished this story with scenery of fish markets and cows grazing along the road running adjacent to the seawall; like the one from my childhood in Guyana, I’ve come back to this scolding from my friend with renewed fondness again and again.

Hal Sirowitz

Hal Sirowitz's "Through Pink-Tinged Glasses" strikes me in the same way, though; the deliberateness of the poet is what's most surprising here. Sirowitz's airy use of short couplets and the comfort that his hanging last line ("...makes any neighborhood seem safe") imbues is masterful. The subtlety of Sirowitz's poem allows for the reader to fill in the spaces not only between the narrative turns, but also the taunting form that he uses with the gaps between couplets begging us to bridge them with our own insights. In this way, "Through Pink-Tinged Glasses" finds its way into the most private parts of our minds and nestles there in a way that the reader doesn't identify as intrusive.

It took me more than a dozen readings to find that the entire poem hinges on the opening, "Your mother used to live / on Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx / while I was dating her, father said." I'd initially been reading the entirety of the poem neglecting, "...father said" which identifies the lyric 'I' of the poem retelling a story told to him by his father, as I'd been introduced to my fond love story of a father walking twelve miles to see the woman he loved.

Bob Holman delivers an incredible reading of "Through Pink-Tinged Glasses" right here on The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly. If it's the only poem you listen to today, it'll be well worth the moments of your life that it brings to you anew. —Ian Khadan

Hal Sirowitz

THROUGH PINK-TINGED GLASSES

Your mother used to live
on Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx

while I was dating her, father said.
Even in those days it was a bad street.

Men were hanging out in front
of stores, obviously not employed

in "nine to five" jobs. What they
were employed at was anybody's

guess, but it certainly wasn't legal.
I saw someone lose a hundred dollars

at a game of craps in the time it took
to walk the length of the block. I once

felt a breeze over my shoulder, heard the sound
of gunfire and hoped the shooting wasn't at me.

I didn't want to be an anonymous victim,
But what I'm really saying is I was so much

in love, the crimes in the street couldn't keep me away.
That's what love does—makes you feel invincible—

makes any neighborhood seem safe.


Bob Holman reads "Through Pink-Tinged Glasses:



Subscribe to Channel Five-Two for first view of new videos.


Hal confesses: "I wanted to write something about Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx. I Googled and saw photos of it when my parents were alive. We lived in the Long Island suburbs. That was supposedly a step up. But where there were no sidewalks was basically telling strangers to stay away."

HAL SIROWITZ is a 1994 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry and is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. He worked as a special education teacher in the New York public school system for 23 years. He has written six books on poetry and is arguably best known for the volumes Mother Said, My Therapist Said, and Father Said.