Praises for Thomas McGrath

1Perhaps I met Thomas McGrath somewhere in Nicaragua at a time when the blackbird’s menacing thunder sounded over our heads: the blackbird flying invisible in the heavens, which alone guard our dreams and the dreams of men and women like him, on the other side of the trenches.

2I don’t recall his appearance, but I immediately recognized his essence as a poet, his true presence, one afternoon in September 1990 at Alice’s house in Ventura—his Selected Poems shining like a blue jewel in the sunlit studio opening on the hills sloping down to California’s serene sea.

3That same night we flew from Santa Barbara to San Francisco. In the secluded Victorian house where we stayed (it was like a hideout of a novel by Dashiell Hammett) I began to enter the translucent waters of his poetry. I regretted the time I had lost for not having read him earlier.

It is autumn but early.
No Crow cries from the dry woods. . .

4I thought of Thoreau in that enchanted forest which had not yet been troubled by the buffaloes with teeth of silver, as Ruben Dario described empire builders.

Where were these giants? The sea offered
A single clue, a symbol: no explanation. . .

5The echoes of Whitman—the grand old man with his beard full of butterflies, as Ruben Dario saw him—sounded in the poetry of Thomas McGrath, an America people’s poet. It may sound over-simple, but that is my praise: Lo mas alto es lo popular.

6One man, singing in the immense night, of the land of his dreams, literally, and to actual people, those who groan under the weight of the wheel of fortune in the carnival of consumerism.

7I was beginning to translate Thomas McGrath’s poetry—his praises for women and for vegetables—when Alice told me in Managua that he had died. I didn’t know that. That there would be an event in Chicago to honor his memory. There, in the city of Carl Sandburg, it would be held in the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union Hall, as we might render homage in the Sandinista Workers’ Center.

8Alice asked me to write a few lines to be read at the celebration.

9In answer to his question in Echoes Inside the Labyrinth:

After the war, who has news for the poet?

10I reply: after the war, the revolution lives on. That is the news from Nicaragua for the poet who, from the other side of the trenches, was the guardian of our dreams.

11Managua, January 1991. Translated by Alice McGrath