The New Anthology of American Poetry: Vol. III: Postmodernisms 1950-Present

JOSEPH AWAD

235 Joseph Awad Ø Silence fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, and I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven. Do you like me? How absurd! What’s a question like that? What’s a silence like that? And what am I hanging around for, riddled with what his silence said? 1974 This poem, one of the last Sexton completed, was dated August 7, 1974. She ended her life less than two months later. JOSEPH AWAD 1929–2009 Joseph awad, like his modernist precursors Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, maintained two professional identities. During the day he was “a man in a suit” who worked as a public relations executive, and at night he wrote poetry on legal pads and notebooks at the kitchen table of his family home in Virginia. Relatively unknown nationally until recently, he is emerging as a major pioneer for the current generation of Arab-American poets. His poetry radiates a mood of modesty and honesty as it explores the poet’s intimate thoughts and feelings. The author of four books of poetry, Awad has been anthologized in Ø Joseph Awad 236 1. Sculptures in which figures emerge from a surrounding flat surface. 2. Cut off. collections of Arab-American, Irish-American, multicultural, and Roman Catholic poetry. Among his awards and honors were the poet laureateship of Virginia from 1998 to 2000 and an Edgar Allan Poe Prize. He served as president of the Poetry Society of Virginia and as vice president of the Virginia Writers Club. A second-generation Lebanese- and Irish-American, Awad was born in the coal-mining town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. His mother died when he was eight years old, and when his father moved to Washington, D.C., and opened a barber shop at the Mayflower Hotel, he lived with his grandparents. In fifth grade, he joined his father in Washington. After graduating with a degree in English from Georgetown University, he worked in the Washington bureau of The New York Daily News and at the Dave Herman public relations firm. He also took graduate classes at George Washington University and studied art at the Corcoran School of Art. He spent his career in the corporate world and retired in 1993 as an executive vice president for public relations at Reynolds Metals. He served as the national president of the Public Relations Society of America in 1982, published The Power of Public Relations with Praeger Publishing in 1985, and was inducted into the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame in 1992. Awad and his wife, Doris, had ten children and lived in Richmond, Virginia. further reading Joseph Awad. Poems. In Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry, ed. Gregory Orfalea and Sharif Elmusa, 133–46, New York: Interlink Publishing, 1999. Ellen Robertson. “Reynolds PR Executive, poet Joseph Awad dies.” Richmond Times-Dispatch. July 19, 2009. www.timesdispatch.com. Stopping at the Mayflower Father, your hallowed ghost Will always haunt me here. The old hotel Is being renovated. In the ballrooms Moldings and golden bas reliefs1 Have been restored to their original splendor. (If only they could restore that golden grin.) And so this morning, early, I descended the dim staircase off the lobby To see the barber shop before it’s shorn2 Of my particular memories, redone Beyond our time together. Your poet son Stopping at the Mayflower Ø 237 Climbed the shoe shine stand, unrecognized By the aging man who worked there in his prime When you were manager. He could not know His busy presence brought me close to you. I could see, inside the shop, the barber chair You worked from eight to six, six days a week. I thought of my Georgetown years, lost afternoons When I dropped by near quitting time. I’d peruse The old Times-Herald or The Daily News Until you finished your last customer, Who, introduced, would say, as if on cue, “Your dad is very proud of you.” You would clip and cut my hair, shave my neck, Give me a shampoo and a steaming towel, Order me a shine. “The works,” you’d quip, Treating me better than your biggest...