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   Friday Afternoons

 

When I was a schoolboy

I built my week on Friday afternoons.

Then we were released

From the prisons of our carved

And inkstained desks,

To go to the closet,

Otherwise kept locked, where shelves

Of books waited in their weeklong dark.

 

After lunch, and waiting for the word,

We moved to the closeted stories

Of adventure, mysteries and explorations,

And domestic tales in which

Children were the heroes in their homes.

 

Each of us in turn

Selected, with little chance to browse,

Either a book not read before simply

By title, and by luck, or read again

A book previously enjoyed.

 

Oh, these were delicious afternoons.

We settled in our wooden seats

Like exploratory pilots in new planes,

While framed in tall schoolhouse windows

The seasons changed from harlequin fall

To white winter, and then blithe spring

We vaguely knew to be symbolic of our age.

 

But whether the windows revealed rain, snow or sun,

We sat in ritualistic silence, and we could hear

The ticking of the clock, birdsong, the rustle

Of papers on the teacher's desk, and the noises

That the schoolhouse and our bodies made

As we turned the pages through Friday afternoons.

 

As I grew through the lagging or spinning weeks,

Through the hard years of the Great Depression,

And my own small joys and depressions,

Through family upheavals and deaths,

Streetcorner rumbles and intimations of war,

Only on Friday afternoons peace reigned

No matter how turbulent a week.

 

There came a Friday when my searching hand

Found Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

In the tall silence of that room

I first heard the “barbaric yawp”

Of this sly and bearded man

Whose image stared out at me

From the book.  His poetry,

Sometimes roaring, sometimes sibilant as the sea,

Was all the sounds I heard that Friday afternoon.

 

With a Whitman poem copied and clutched,

I ran up the slanting streets of Manhattan

To proclaim to my mother, who in a dozen years

Would be no more, the prime discovery

Of Friday afternoons.  And there, in that

Fading autumn light, excited over our glasses of tea,

I sang for her my boyhood Whitman poem,

And sowed the seed that grew

To be this song.

 

 

 

                                                                                    From Further Reflections