Contributions by John Freeman

John Freeman is Editor of Granta. His criticism has appeared in the Guardian, The New York Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. Between 2006 and 2008, he served as president of the National Book Critics Circle. His first book, The Tyranny of E-Mail, was published in 2009. How to Read a Novelist will be published by FSG in the fall.

John Freeman

Published on April 23rd of 2013 by John Freeman and Valeria Meiller in Poetry.

 

THE HEAT

At night as the heat’s
warble strummed to
a ticking silence,
and the crabgrass
turned blue then green
then black, the branches
above would relax
and gently pluck my
window-screen, like
the dark-haired woman
who, years later, would
scratch to be let in.

 

**

UNKNOWING

Your father was born after the earthquake & fire.
Began work at four, buried his mother at six.
Summers he picked prunes in the valley,
the sun searing spots onto his narrow shoulders.
He lost an eye. Blew out his left ear-drum
in a packing plant accident. These things
were what one expected.

He never made friends. They were a luxury,
he could not afford. He smoked for a decade,
through college, when he worked full-time as a
teacher. Nights he dedicated to numbers. Found
pleasure in the orderly arrangement of the known
world. You were a gift, born at the end of the
depression, to his German wife—unaware of
the rubble from which you emerged.

You were a … Read More »






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