Saturday's Poem: The Hero's Journey
The Hero’s Journey
I remember the first time I looked at the spotless marble floor
of a giant hotel lobby
and understood that someone had waxed and polished it all nightand that someone else had pushed his cart of cleaning supplies
down the long air-conditioned corridors
of the Steinberg Building across the streetand emptied all two hundred and forty-three wastebaskets
stopping now and then to scrape up chewing gum
with a special flat-bladed tool
he keeps in his back pocket.It tempered my enthusiasm for “The Collected Sonnets of Hugh
Pembley-Witherton”
and for Kurt von Heinzelman’s “Epic of the Seekers for the Grail,”Chapter 5, “The Trial,” in which he describes how the
“tall and fair-complexioned” knight, Gawain,
makes camp one night beside a windblown cemeterybut cannot sleep for all the voices
rising up from underground—Let him stay out there a hundred nights, the little wonder boy,
with his thin blanket and his cold armor and his
useless sword,
until he understands exactly how
the glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters.In the morning he will wake and gallop back to safety;
he will hear his name embroidered into toasts and songs.But now he knows there is a country he had not accounted for,
and that country has its citizens:the one-armed baker sweeping out his shop at 4 a.m.;
soldiers fitting every horse in Prague with diapers
before the emperor’s arrival;and that woman in the nursing home,
who has worked there for a thousand years,taking away the bedpans,
lifting up and wiping off the soft heroic buttocks of Odysseus.
Note from Cynthia: I read this poem by Tony Hoagland in the New Yorker several months ago, and I immediately loved it.
I think it's a beautiful tribute to all the humble, hardworking "secondary characters" throughout history who tend to the unglamorous and essential work without fanfare or recognition.