I'll be offering a poem a week during April, which is National Poetry Month.
This week's poem, a seemingly simple one by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, travels a long way in a short space -- from the literal hats of generations ago to present metaphorical ones. At the end, you can almost feel the hat fly off in the wind, an eternity of space finally opening up after a lifetime of work.
The Death of the Hat
Once every man wore a hat.
In the ashen newsreels,
the avenues of cities
are broad rivers flowing with hats.
The ballparks swelled
with thousands of straw hats,
brims and bands,
rows of men smoking
and cheering in shirtsleeves.
Hats were the law.
They went without saying.
You noticed a man without a hat in a crowd.
You bought them from Adams or Dobbs
who branded your initials in gold
on the inside band.
Trolleys crisscrossed the city.
Steamships sailed in and out of the harbor.
Men with hats gathered on the docks.
There was a person to block your hat
and a hatcheck girl to mind it
while you had a drink
or ate a steak with peas and a baked potato.
In your office stood a hat rack.
The day war was declared
everyone in the street was wearing a hat.
And they were wearing hats
when a ship loaded with men sank in the icy sea.
My father wore one to work every day
and returned home
carrying the evening paper,
the winter chill radiating from his overcoat.
But today we go bareheaded
into the winter streets,
stand hatless on frozen platforms.
Today the mailboxes on the roadside
and the spruce trees behind the house
wear cold white hats of snow.
Mice scurry from the stone walls at night
in their thin fur hats
to eat the birdseed that has spilled.
And now my father, after a life of work,
wears a hat of earth,
and on top of that,
a lighter one of cloud and sky -- a hat of wind.
--Billy Collins (1941- )
Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. She now lives in Traverse City with her husband, Jerry Beasley, also a retired professor. You can learn more about her on her Web site, fledabrown.com
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