David Starkey: Two Poems
1924 | Song of the Hawkers and Beggars

1924

Year of bootleggers and Tales
of the Jazz Age, the Teapot Dome
scandal and Leopold and Loeb.
Women with chauffeurs and women
scrounging through dusty piles
of coal. College boys in Oxford Bags
(seventy inches at the trouser cuffs)
and Hitler busted for the Beer Hall Putsch.

Down in Louisiana, my grandmother
watched Rudy Valentino
and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.,
at the picture show. She taught
first-grade in Lake Charles and waited
for my grandfather-to-be to finish
his degree at Mississippi State.

Lenin lying in state twenty-one days
into the new year, the marble tomb,
the case of sparkling glass.
Wilson finally deceased in February,
"a broken piece of machinery,"
he described himself, then Kafka gone
in June and Calvin Coolidge's little boy,
dead of blood poisoning in July.

That same month, she watched
as a black man on 10th Street
was beaten almost to death
for staring too long and too lasciviously
at a white woman. No arrests were made.

The Japanese were barred from immigrating,
and Will Rogers was on the radio.

"Something big was coming,"
my grandmother told me before she died.
"You didn't know good or bad,
but you knew sure enough that it was big."

Song of the Hawkers and Beggars

Hello. Baksheesh? Hello. Madáme, hello?
Excuse, which country are you coming from?

You like to take a photograph? You pay
me now. Okay? You want to change dollars?

Hello. Baksheesh? Hello. Madáme, hello?

You like postcards? Fifty rupees. Okay?
Okay? Forty. Okay, thirty. How much?

Excuse, which country are you coming from?

You like nice elephant? Top quality.
Real ivory tusk, real gold. You like? You take.

Hello. Baksheesh? Hello. Madáme, hello?

Here, peacock fan. Silver braclet. Good slides.
Turquoise necklace. Incense. Bangles. Buddha.

Excuse, which country are you coming from?

Hello, my friend. Baby need food.
Please, sir, Babu, one rupee only, please.

Excuse, which country are you coming from?
Hello. Baksheesh? Hello. Madáme, hello?

Poet's Biography:

David Starkey, who teaches in the writing program at the University of California-Santa Barbara, is the author of the textbook, Poetry Writing: Theme and Variations (NTC, 1999), as well as several books of poems from small presses, most recently Fear of Everything, winner of Palanquin Press's Spring 2000 chapbook contest. He's published more than 250 poems in literary magazines over the past thirteen years, including work in recent or forthcoming issues of GSU Review, Open City, The Pedestal, Rattle, and Red Rock Review.