Reviewing A Momentary Glory, Harvey Shapiro’s last poems, brought me to Congregation-Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible, which was edited by David Rosenberg and published in 1987. Shapiro, Norman Finkelstein reminds the reader in his introduction to the poems, contributed an essay to the collection, a thick volume near my desk with many notes tucked into it. “The Jews are a remembering people,” Shapiro says in a passage on the prophet Joel I underlined before I stopped that abusive practice. “It is what their religion is about.”
It is also what Shapiro’s life was seamlessly about, whether elements of that life meant writing prose or poetry, or editing, or doing a combination of one or more. Shapiro was the editor behind Martin Luther King, Jr’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” suggesting it during his distinguished career at The New York Times Magazine. He knew when to embellish and when to leave spare enough alone, so that like his fellow Jews, he would remain true to the command to remember, and to teach.
I stood at the door of a B-17
with one engine on fire.
I had been told to get ready
to bail out. Beneath me were
the snow-covered mountains
of Yugoslavia. Around me
was nothing but air.
I wanted to stand there forever.
This is the voice of an old man remembering what it was like to be young, fighting for an urgent cause (he dropped out of Yale to serve in World War Two), and struck by his momentary place in what should have been a kind of heaven. So much eloquent complexity in so few lines. In “Planning,” he is just as masterful in a poem that acknowledges his understanding that death is not far away:
In my final years
I have moved into a basement apartment
so I can get used to the steps
of the living above me
and to their sweet weight.
You don’t have to be a Jew, as Shapiro obviously was, or a Catholic convert born into the Jewish tradition, as I am, to appreciate the tender wisdom of what is said here.
Born after the end of “the war to end all wars,” he lived to recall not just World War Two, Korea and Viet Nam, but September 11, 2001. “The plague years,” he called our age, in a poem called “2007.” “In ascendancy still,” he said simply, naming the illness afflicting us that is fed by the “Angel of Death,” a classic Jewish image.
Each spare, compassionate line in every poem in this volume serves as a talisman worthy of memory, crafted to perfection , meaning of course never self-conscious. And always worthy not just of memory but of honoring that memory.
Shapiro’s wartime bravery, and his role in the news media helped shaped the way he saw what he needed to write, and also gave his poems a kind of undergirding that strongly suggests his loving, ethical worldliness. “City Poem” is a calm, vivid beauty.
Bare but numinous trees,
even in winter, even in the city
feeding on cement but bearing
the whole burden of the air
and the misery that seeps from the stones
and from those who wander among them.
Of all the different kind of light
I like it best when night comes on,
near dark on the river and the town
when the lights along the bridge
become jewel- like and shine for me
as they did before, when my heart was whole
and I began my journeying.
“Journeying” sounds awkward here, arrhythmic, yet just right, slowing down to the speed of an unsure, unscarred young man who breathes in what his wide open eyes and unbroken heart have before him. The French call this “ l’heure bleu,” the blue hour, and it both a state of mind and a state of time. It is so cherished that one could get lost in what it has to offer, a strand of something as valuable as glimmering, fading light or a life lived long, deeply and well, whose creations, like dusk itself, return, as tangible objects .
The piece continues :
Memories, like ancient ruins I visit them.
Lost in the city of a lifetime.
Street dark with rain and black umbrellas.
In Brooklyn, sky lightens over water.
Savage gulls ride the current, eyes bright for spoil.
Fever, like the edge of desert.
To see the dawn and the broad ocean.
“Ocean” is the last word in the poem. It could have been sky. And Shapiro could have said “wide” instead of “broad.” Shapiro’s poems have a spirit that reflects Jewish painterly recollection—Chagall without the fussy leaps of imagination- and also naturally, Whitman’s American self-singing that gave permission to go from the desert to Brooklyn in ways the writer’s forebears could not have imagined.
The gentle passion in the pages of A Momentary Glory are infused with a straightforward individualism that is never isolating, because praise, which Shapiro sanctifies in a poem called “Psalm,” is such an essential part of his recollection, of succeeding in the endeavor of life, in the lettered life. “Psalm,” quoted below in full, is the last composition in these pages, proving that Shapiro met his aspiration to do right by his history, his gifts.
I am still on a rooftop in Brooklyn
on your holy day. The harbor is before me,
Governor’s Island, Verrazano Bridge
and the Narrows. I keep in my head what Rabbi Nachmann
said about the world being a narrow bridge and that the important thing
is not to be afraid. So on this day
I bless my mother and father, that they be
not fearful where they wander. And I
and I ask them to bless them and before you
close your Book of Life, your Sefer Hachayim,
remember that I always praised your world
and your splendor and that my tongue
tried to say your name on Court Street in Brooklyn.
Take me safely through the Narrows to the sea.
