Sherry Chandler

Robert Penn Warren

Big doins this whole weekend in honor of Red Warren’s centennial. Western has had the Robert Penn Warren Centennial Celebration and at Gravel Switch there’s the Kentucky Writers Day Celebration at Historic Penn’s General Store with a tribute to Warren. And the U.S. Postal Service has issued a Warren pictorial stamp in honor of the occasion. I refer you to the Kentucky Literary Newsletter and Calendar for details about these events. (Thanks, Charlie, I stole the stamp image from you.) Of course, today, Robert Penn Warren’s birthday, is also Kentucky Writers Day.

I am rather hoping that the weight of these events will balance the scales a bit against the “Just Us” Sunday at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville.

A poem from Robert Penn Warren’s New and Selected Poems 1923-1985 (Random House, 1985):

The Cross

Once, after storm, I stood at the cliff-head,
And up black basalt the sea’s white claws
Still flung their eight fathoms up to have my blood.
In the blaze of new sun they leap in cruel whiteness,
Not forgiving me that their screaming lunges
Had nightlong been no more than a dream
In the tangle and warmth and breathless dark
Of love’s huddle and sleep, while stars were black
And the tempest swooped down to snatch our tiles.

By three, wind down and sun still high,
I walked the beach of the little cove
Where scavengings of the waves were flung—
Old oranges, cordage, a bottle of beer
With the cap still tight, a baby-doll
But the face smashed in, a boom from some mast,
And most desperately hunched by volcanic stone
As though trying to cling in some final hope,
But downed hours back you could be damned sure,
The monkey, wide-eyed, bewildered yet
By the terrible screechings and jerks and bangs,
And no friend to come and just say ciao.

I took him up, looked in his eyes,
As orbed as dark aggies, as bright as tears,
With a glaucous glint in deep sightlessness,
Yet still seeming human with all they had seen—
Like yours or mine, if luck had run out.

So, like a fool, I said ciao to him.

Under wet fur I felt how skin slid loose
On the poor little bones, and the delicate
fingers yet grasped, at God knew what.
So I sat with him there, watching wind abate.

No funnel on the horizon showed.
And of course, no sail. And the cliff’s shadow
Had found the cove. Well, time to go.

I took time, yes, to bury him,
In a scraped-out hole, little cairn on top.
And I enough fool to improvise
A cross—

Two sticks tied together to prop in the sand.

But what use that? The sea comes back.

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