It’s well known that John Updike was one of America’s best fictioneers (long and short).  What is less well known is that he was also one of our better poets.  Having written about Mickey Newbury’s album and song Heaven Help the Child below, we were struck by one of Updike’s poems (written shortly before his passing) on childhood, hometowns and aging.  Check out “Peggy Lutz, Fred Murth” below.

“They’ve been in my fiction; both now dead,

Peggy just recently, long stricken (like

my Grandma) with Parkinson’s disease.

But what a peppy knockout Peggy was! –

cheerleader, hockey star, May Queen, RN.

Pigtailed in kindergarten, she caught my mother’s

eye, but she was too much girl for me.

Fred – so bright, so quietly wry – his

mother’s eye fell on me, a “nicer” boy

than his son’s pet pals. Fred’s slight wild streak

was tamed by diabetes. At the end,

it took his toes and feet. Last time we met,

his walk rolled wildly, fetching my coat. With health

he might have soared. As was, he taught me smarts.

Dear friends of childhood, classmates, thank you,

scant hundred of you, for providing a

sufficiency of human types; beauty,

bully, hanger-on, natural,

twin, and fatso – all a writer needs,

all there in Shillington, its trolley cars

and little factories, cornfields and trees,

leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines.

To think of you brings tears less caustic

than those the thought of death brings. Perhaps

we meet our heaven at the start and not

the end of life. Even then were tears

and fear and struggle, but the town itself

draped in plain glory the passing days.

*

The town forgave me for existing; it

included me in Christmas carols, songfests

(though I sang poorly) at the Shillington,

the local movie house. My father stood,

in back, too restless to sit, but everybody

knew his name, and mine. In turn I knew

my Granddad in the overalled town crew.

I’ve written these before, these modest facts,

but their meaning has no bottom in my mind.

The fragments in their jiggled scope collide

to form more sacred windows. I had to move

to beautiful New England – its triple

deckers, whited churches, unplowed streets –

to learn how drear and deadly life can be.”