The Golden Shovel by Terrance Hayes

The Golden Shovel
by: Terrance Hayes

after Gwendolyn Brooks

I. 1981

When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we
cruise at twilight until we find the place the real 

men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.
His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we 

drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left
in them but approachlessness. This is a school 

I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we
are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk 

of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late.
Standing in the middle of the street last night we 

watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike
his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight 

Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we
used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing 

his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin.
The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We 

watched him run to us looking wounded and thin.
He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin. 

He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We
stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz, 

how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June
the boy would be locked upstate. That night we 

got down on our knees in my room. If I should die
before I wake. Da said to me, it will be too soon. 

II. 1991

Into the tented city we go, we-
 akened by the fire’s ethereal 

afterglow. Born lost and cool-
 er than heartache. What we 

know is what we know. The left
hand severed and school- 

 ed by cleverness. A plate of we-
 ekdays cooking. The hour lurk- 

 ing in the afterglow. A late-
night chant. Into the city we

go. Close your eyes and strike
a blow. Light can be straight-

 ened by its shadow. What we
break is what we hold. A sing- 

ular blue note. An outcry sin-
 ged exiting the throat. We 

push until we thin, thin-
 king we won’t creep back again. 

While God licks his kin, we
sing until our blood is jazz, 

we swing from June to June.
We sweat to keep from we-

eping. Groomed on a die-
 t of hunger, we end too soon.

There is something magical about this poem to me.  You may remember from about a week back the Gwendolyn Brooks poem, "We Real Cool."  This poem takes from that in a poetic form Hayes named the "Golden Shovel."  The idea is to take a line or lines from a another poem, give credit to the poet, and then to use each word of the lines (or phrase) you took to create a new poem.

As you can see here, Hayes took the whole poem and in the first part he uses each word with care at the end of the line.  In the second part, he plays a bit with the forms of the words, but the intent is still the same--the end words sounding or having the sounds of the original poem.  It's a pretty awesome poetic form, and if you want to learn more about it, take a look at Robert Lee Brewer's post "Golden Shovel: Poetic Form" from the Writer's Digest.

What I love most about this poem is that accomplishes that desire of Hayes to be almost song-like in its reminiscences, but it also allows us to look at words in a disjointed way that adds some wonderful thought-ideas into the poem.  I also love that it harkens back to that beautiful Gwendolyn Brooks poem, offering a new vision of her words to couple with the old.  The layers that build from this are something you can trace back to their originator, and I love that in this way you are honoring a past poet's writings while creating something new in the present from their words.  It is a new way to converse in my eyes, much like we had in the past (with newspaper columns, poems being written by poets about other poets' works--the same holding true sometimes for stories, too,) but also something we can follow without having to do hours of literary and scholarly research.  It is a poet's conversation--layered and lyrical, sensuous as song--a memory within a memory whose words create an echo in your mind.

And to me it is just super, super cool.