Astyanax

As I have stated, and sometimes alluded to, in my past posts, I have been a teacher for the better part of the last forty-two years. However, I have been working with kids for much longer than that. When I was a junior in college, I began working with the New York City Housing Authority's Anti-Poverty Program. In my post of January 27Th, I explained how I became interested in working with dysfunctional youth. I translated that one inspiring moment into working with these children through the poverty program. Not just hiring them for summer work, but working with them outside the job as well. Encouraging them to talk to me of their pain, their involvement with gangs, with abuse, both drugs and personal abuse, and I did what I could to help, whether it was to find them winter jobs, get them into rehab., pairing them up with mentors, even taking them around a city they lived in but never really saw. And encouraging them to keep up their education. Sometimes it worked and they prospered. Sometimes it did not. The heroin addict, Emanuel, from my poem, Triptych of the Lamb was partially based on a young man I worked with, and whose sixteen year old body I had to identify on a project rooftop on the Lower East Side.

I didn't just limit my college efforts to the Big Apple. In Jersey City, where I was attending St. Peter's College, I coordinated the Jersey City CANDO program, went down to lower Jersey City in the evening to tutor poor youngsters so that they could graduate from college, and in my senior year in my own parish in Spotswood, NJ took all of the boys that the church CCD program couldn't work with in their weekly classes, and ran my own class every Sunday after mass. In the 1970's, I worked as the playground supervisor at Southwood School in Madison Township running a recreation program in the morning; then, in the afternoon, when I was off the clock, I ran a softball league to take local gang leaders off the streets and out of trouble, and later worked at an evening recreation program and coached a basketball team. You might find it humorous that in a New Jersey suburb like Madison Township there would be gangs, and that they would have names like the Southwood Gang, the Burger King Gang and the Browntown Gang. What was not humorous, however, was that at least eight young men never made it to twenty years old, dying summer after summer in drunk driving accidents. Sadness, loneliness and loss are not restricted to the big cities. They are the providence of the human heart. And from the time that I was a teenager myself, I worked with as many of them as I could. I felt like a first aid volunteer, trying to staunch the blood from a cut to the carotid on the neck of youth. I tried to help as many as I could. I was successful with some, not so with others.

To make a long story short, I did pretty much the same thing when I was Director of Planning at the Shore Area YMCA in Asbury Park. And for the last twenty-five years in Long Branch, NJ. The M.O. was always the same. Gangs, abused children, and again the sad and the lonely.

Seeing the things that I have seen has given me a serious demeanor and a heavy heart. While working with one of these young men a few years ago, I wrote the following poem. I share it here tonight because of the poem I posted two nights ago. This poem is not one of my best. Some would call it maudlin and overly sentimental. Some would even say it was poorly written. I have not shown it to any one until tonight. As I look toward the future and retirement, I look back at what I have seen over a long career. This poem, for what it's worth, is how I feel as I look both back and forward.

“Mother, I am all alone.
To the dark ships now they drive me,
And I cannot see you, Mother.”
Euripides


Astyanax
Christopher Bogart

Where can our children find love,
When love has been dashed against the truth of a life
Numbed by the pain of abject abandonment?

Where can our children find hope,
When hope has been dashed against the cynicism of a life
Deafened by the howling winds of despair?

Where can our children find dreams,
When dreams have been dashed against the reality of a life
Blinded by the darkness of an eternal night?

How can our children cope with this pain,
When this pain has been their only mother, their only father,
In a life bereft of dreams, of hope,
Of love?

Maybe Hector’s infant son was truly the lucky one.
The soldiers of the burning night dashed his brains against the stones
And threw his body off the walls of Troy
When he was but a boy,
Bereft of Love,
Abandoned by Hope,
Denied his Dreams,
But not his pain,
Or so it seems.