The Orphans
by Ben Myers
Hi, I’m Benjamin Myers for “Poets on the Plains.” Today I’m going to share with you one of my own poems.
I’ve been writing poetry since I was in middle school, but it was a couple of summers during high school spent at the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute at Quartz Mountain that confirmed my dedication to the art of poetry and set me on the certain path to the writing life.
Since then, I was appointed the 2015/2016 Poet Laureate of Oklahoma, and I have published four books of poetry. I have also published three books of nonfiction. I teach literature, great books, and creative writing at Oklahoma Baptist University, where I am the Crouch-Mathis Professor of Literature and the director of the great books honors program.
The poem I am going to share with you is “The Orphans,” from my 2022 book, The Family Book of Martyrs, published by Lamar University Literary Press. The poem was also previously published in Tupelo Quarterly.
I wrote this poem when my three children—two of whom are now in college—where still quite small. The poem is based on the many summer afternoons I spent sitting on the porch reading while my children played in the yard, one of the perks of being a college professor being that I can often work from home in the summer. The peculiar weight and slowness of an Oklahoma summer day are an essential part of the poem. The Mimosa tree I mention early in the poem is a common tree in this part of the state and tends to reproduce itself rampantly, cropping up in flower beds and other inconvenient places. It is very much a tree that knows how to grow and spread in tough soil.
Here's the poem:
The Orphans
My children are pretending that I’m dead.
The spider leaves of the mimosa tree
for shade, they play a game they call “the orphans,”
stretched out in grass bald dirt beside the roots
and moaning as they wake from some imagined
airplane crash that has left them all alone
in darkest jungle. Right away they start
to gather leaves and drop them in a bucket
full of rain water, stirring with a stick
and calling it breakfast. I sit on the porch
and think, What level-headed kids we’ve raised,
attending to the most important meal
even with my charred and smoking corpse nearby!
But then I think of my own mother standing
at our screen door, already in her fifties when
her mother died but bawling out
into the fields, I am an orphan,
like she was giving voice to something we
all know. The children tiptoe out from shade,
into the glare of sun, exploring
their jungle home. They are rehearsing worst
scenarios but also drawing lines
around themselves, like people
in their coloring books contoured in solid black
for filling in later. The cat with a lazy eye
is watching them. They’ve put mimosa blossoms
in their hair. Sitting on the porch, I float
between the generations and hear
the children’s voices tearing ragged strips
from summer quiet. I stand, wanting to call
to them out there in all that heavy light,
but I can barely see them now in the glare.
And when I raise my hand to block the sun,
I freeze, suddenly aware of how much
I look like a man who is waving goodbye.
My favorite plays of Shakespeare are the late romances, in which he mixes tragedy and comedy. To me, that seems to be the fullest and truest depiction of life. So I try to use both humor and pathos in my poems, even in the same poem when possible. That’s what I hope I’ve done with “The Orphans.”
In this poem, I wanted to capture a period in life that is both poignant and often humorous: that phase in which our children grow up while our parents grow old. There we are in the middle, realizing the inevitable passing of time in two different but related ways. We “float between the generations,” as I say in the poem.
But I did not want the poem to be completely sad. Hence the humor and hence the suggestion that the children are preparing themselves to go on without me, drawing their outlines to color in later with who they will be. That is my sense of hope in the poem: we go on from generation to generation. Knowing that helps me prepare to wave goodbye and be at peace about it.
In a larger sense, I hope the poem suggests that we are all connected, woven together through the relationships that make up our lives. In that sense, we are never really alone. None of us is truly an orphan.
For “Poets on the Plains,” I’m Benjamin Myers, sitting on the porch in Chandler, Oklahoma.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Benjamin Myers is the Crouch-Matthis Professor of Literature and the director of the Great Books Honors Program at Oklahoma Baptist University. A former poet laureate of Oklahoma, he is the author of four books of poetry. His work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Image, The Yale Review, 32 Poems, Rattle, and The South Carolina Review, and his sonnet sequence, Black Sunday, was praised by The Wallstreet Journal as one of the “five best books on the dust bowl.” He is a contributing editor for Front Porch Republic and lives in Chandler, OK. His most recent book of poems is The Family Book of Martyrs (2023), and his second book of nonfiction, Ambiguity and Belonging, was recently published by Belle Point Press.
Benjaminmyerspoetry.com
