Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (36 page)

Here are a few of those poems that moved me most.

Wordsworth, ‘Surprised By Joy’

‘impatient as the Wind / I turned to share the transport – Oh! With whom. / But thee, long buried in the silent tomb . . . but how could I forget thee? . . . knowing
my heart’s best treasure was no more.’ The terrifying paradox of remembrance.

Shelley,
The Masque of Anarchy

The brutality of the title refers not to the anarchy of protest but to brutality of politicians who put it down. ‘Like Oppression’s thundering doom / ringing through
each heart and brain / Heard of again – again – again.’

Rilke, ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes’

Orpheus desperate to get her back. But as Colm Tóibín, who chose the poem, writes: ‘The dead
will not come back, but the words will . . . filled with sad
wisdom as the woman who was so loved will move into eternity, or nothing much, or perhaps nothing at all . . .’

Cavafy, ‘Ithaka’

Not a dirge of dire loss and sorrow, but a zestful, thrilling command to the spirit of living fully, from the sensual ‘may you stop at Phoenician trading stations’
(twenty-first century traditional
arts-and-crafts markets?) ‘to buy fine things / . . . mother of pearl / . . . sensual perfumes’.

And on the serious side, ‘may you visit many Egyptian cities / to gather stores of knowledge’ (contemporary outer-space exploration centres!). While seeking fulfilment, ‘keep
Ithaka always in your mind / Arriving there is what you are destined for.’ But what Ithaka gave you is ‘the marvellous
journey. / Without her you would not have set out. / She has
nothing left to give you now.’

Tagore, ‘Let My Country Awake’

In perhaps the most overtly political poem here, along with Shelley’s ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, Tagore brings private ethics alongside civic
responsibility as he sees that his country, India, must rouse itself: to where ‘knowledge is free . . . the world has not been
broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls
. . . the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.’ The mind is led forward to the ‘heaven of freedom’. However, he conceives that
heaven to be reached by the path of religious faith called upon. ‘Into that freedom, my Father, let my country awake.’

Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’

‘The
day of his death was a dark cold day / . . . But for him it was his last afternoon as himself. . . . the words of a dead man. / When the brokers are roaring like
beasts on the floor of the bourse . . . / And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed. / You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: the parish of rich women,
physical decay . . .

‘Mad Ireland hurt
you into poetry.’ Mad Africa, mad world, does this for the great ones’ successors?

Brecht, ‘The Book Burnings’

‘When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge / should be publicly burned and on all sides / oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books / to the bonfires,
a banished / writer whose ‘books had been passed over . . . wrote a letter to those in power / Burn me!
. . . Haven’t my books / Always reported the truth? . . . And here you are
treating me like a liar / I command you: Burn me!’

I read this poem today in twenty-first-century South Africa, where the Protection of State Information bill is about to be adopted – here, another secrecy act about to become law moves
Jack Mapanje, who chose the poem, to tears of ironic laughter.

Porter, ‘An
Exequy’

‘When your slim shape from photographs / Stands at my door and gently asks / If I have any work to do / Or will I come to bed with you . . .’ Ian McEwan, who chose
this poem, writes ‘now that Peter has gone and that deeply troubled marriage is a faded memory, this evocation of domestic intimacy, which is also a ghostly beckoning towards death, seems all
the more poignant.’ For
me, this poem could bring a man, fearful of such loss in his own life, close to emotional breakdown.

Bishop, ‘Crusoe in England’

Tactile imagery – so that on reading, this poem is with one’s flesh, a personal living experience. Crusoe’s island from the reversed loneliness of a different
exile, in England: ‘My island seemed to be / a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere’s / left-over
clouds . . . their parched throats / were hot to touch . . . I often gave way to
self-pity / “Do I deserve this? I suppose I must . . . Was there a moment when I actually chose this?”’ Then his desperate loneliness: ‘Just when I thought I couldn’t
stand it / another minute longer, Friday came . . . / Friday was nice and we were friends / If only he had been a woman! / I wanted to propagate my
kind.’ The power of the poet’s
imaginative creation, as personalities of familiar emotional legends are here brought face-to-face, alive with our present.

Everyone who reads this collection will be roused: disturbed by the pain, exalted in the zest for joy given by poets, all the way from ‘Elegy’ to ‘eulogy to a hell of a
dame’ to ‘An End or A Beginning’.

The editors wish to acknowledge the inspiration of the late Josephine Hart and her husband Maurice Saatchi, as well as William Sieghart and iF Poems in the UK, and Billy Collins
in the USA, in their tireless efforts to bring poetry to a wider audience – just a few examples of trailblazers we very much hope to emulate with this anthology.

We profoundly thank Amnesty
International for its enthusiastic partnership, especially Nicky Parker for her invaluable skills, alongside those of her colleagues Maggie Paterson and Lucy
MacNamara in London and Carol Gregory and Suzanne Trimel in New York.

Margaret Jull Costa and A. S. Kline were kind enough to provide us with fresh translations of Spanish poetry. We are also grateful to Hyde Flippo and Terry Lajtha
for their translations of
German and French poems. Graham Henderson and Gabby Meadows of Poet in the City, London, were also encouraging supporters.

For help in locating or following up with contributors, or other such assistance, we are indebted to: Sven Becker, Cindy Blake, Carol Blue, Felicity Blunt, Mary Bly, Lucy Bright, Tina Brown, Ed
Clarke, Rita Cruise O’Brien, Joe Dunthorne, Isabel
Freer, Natalie Galustian, Heather Glen, Lars Knudsen, Damon Lane, Seb Loden, Jillian Longnecker, John Martin, Alex Moorehead, John David
Morley, Kathy Robbins, Shira Rockowitz, Mary Jane Skalski, Joe Shrapnel, Anna Waterhouse, Jane Wellesley, and Catherine Williams. Many other friends, agents and their
assistants have also gone to some trouble to help us along the way; we apologise for not naming
them all here.

Alexander Hammond displayed considerable energy and persistence in hunting down copyright holders and negotiating on our behalves. For help in the home straight with this mammoth task, we thank
Fred Courtright and Amanda Sumner. We are also grateful, as ever, to our representatives Gill Coleridge and Cara Jones of Rogers, Coleridge and White.

Dr Ad Vingerhoets, Professor
of Clinical Psychology at Holland’s Tilburg University, author of
Why Only Humans Weep
, kindly fact-checked Ben’s preface on the mechanics of
crying, which was also informed by Dr Tom Lutz’s incisive study
Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears.

All Holdens in both our lives have lent valuable support and assistance, especially Salome, George, Ione, Amanda, Sam, Ursula, Rosemary,
and Joe. Particular thanks to Salome for her generous
help with an unusually complex set of proofs.

We are especially grateful to Ian Chapman and Suzanne Baboneau of Simon & Schuster UK for their faith in the project from the outset, and to their colleagues Helen Mockridge, Rik Ubhi and
Sarah Birdsey. Similar thanks go to Jon Karp, Michael Szczerban and their colleagues at Simon & Schuster
US. Many writers on both sides of the Atlantic are familiar with the rapier-sharp verbal
acumen of our commissioning editor Richard Cohen; we are pleased to add our names to the list.

Above all, we wish to thank our contributors for so generously giving of their time and energy not merely in sharing a poem that they cannot read without a tear, but in taking the trouble to
explain why.
We are also, of course, very much in the debt of the poets themselves, and will always remain so.

Poetry as an art form almost certainly predates literacy. Early poets must have performed their work, using the power of its tight structure, rhythms and cadences to stir their
listeners, but
also to lodge words in their memories. Poetry still touches hearts and minds, even in our digital world.

One of Amnesty’s first prisoners of conscience was the Angolan poet and doctor Agostinho Neto. He suffered terrible brutality at the hands of the ruling Portuguese authorities before
becoming the first President of Angola. Like Neto, all poets rely on the human right to freedom of expression,
but throughout history they have been amongst the first targeted by repressive
governments, presumably because of their power to stir emotions and liberate ideas.

Being jailed, however, isn’t a great poetry deterrent. Many turn to it for comfort in the darkest of times. Guantánamo prisoners inscribed poems on polystyrene cups in the days
before they were allowed paper. Malawian Jack Mapanje
used his malaria tablets to write poems on the floor of his cell. Soviet prisoner poet Irena Ratuschinskaya scratched verses onto bars of soap
with a pin or the burnt end of a matchstick, memorised them and then washed them off. Realising Irina was desperate for paper, her husband wrote her abusive letters that he knew would be delivered,
concentrating his messages into a
small square that
left a large blank margin for her to write. Such was her desperation to express herself through poetry.

A particular characteristic of poetry is that its writers tend to pay minutely close attention to their subject matter. By using intimate details to express universal truths, they make us feel
‘that could be me’.
As Melvyn Bragg says, ‘all great poems are about each one of us’. The poet’s
insights are transmitted to the reader. It’s a two-way
creative process that liberates and enlightens both parties, and it lies at the crux of why our human right to freedom of expression is so important. Tom McCarthy puts it well: ‘. . . how
people struggle to connect with art. And how the artist struggles to connect with his audience and remain true to . . . well, the truth. Regardless of
the side you play for, citizen or artist, the
need to reach out, to connect, to feel, and to affect is so satisfying and so elusive.’

This anthology might be accused of sexism because it deliberately excludes women contributors. Others may mock the very idea of men crying over poetry. But this is another reason why we at
Amnesty are interested in it. It directly addresses the assumption
bordering on cliché that women are more emotional – weaker – than men. Yet the contributions are all written by
successful, influential men (some with very tough images) who admit to crying. Many share deeply personal insights and experiences, all provoked by poetry. Their emotional honesty is a healthy
contrast to the behaviour that most societies expect of men. We know that bottling up emotions
can lead to aggression. More than this, gender stereotyping is dangerous because it represses ability
and ambition, it encourages discrimination and it upholds social inequalities that are a root cause of violence. We hope that this anthology will encourage boys, in particular, to know that crying
(and poetry) isn’t just for girls.

Writing poetry – or responding to it – happens because
people care
. And it’s our capacity for caring that underpins our human rights.
Individuals
who care have real power to make a difference. Amnesty International, now a global movement of some three million people, began because of one man’s outrage and his courage to do something
about it. It was 1961 when the lawyer Peter Benenson read about two Portuguese students imprisoned for toasting freedom,
was inspired to take action and called on others to join him. This anthology
is emblematic of the human struggle to make a difference, and we at Amnesty are profoundly grateful to all the contributors. Most of all, we thank Anthony and Ben Holden for their generosity in
sharing this project with us.

Please see how you can make a difference by contacting us at Amnesty.

Kate Allen, Director

Amnesty International UK

The Human Rights Action Centre

17–25 New Inn Yard

London EC2A 3EA

www.amnesty.org.uk

Amnesty International USA

5 Penn Plaza,

New York,

NY 10001

www.amnestyusa.org

Italic page numbers refer to works of poetry.