Richard Hendricks at his Alma Mater, Columbia University.
Three Poems
By Richard Hendricks
Richard Hendricks, a 55-year-old New York bartender and concession-stand attendant in Broadway theaters, remembers playing “Tag, you’re it” with bricks, as a kid in the South Bronx. He remembers refusing to learn how to write after his mother died when Richard was 5, and he remembers the aunt who told him: “You killed your mother, just by being born.” He remembers sleeping on New York rooftops in winter as a runaway at 14, and unloading railroad cars at Port of Elizabeth, New Jersey, later that year.
At 15, he was a hippie sleeping in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and at 17 – “feeling my life was going nowhere” – he got his father to sign the paper okaying the kid’s enlistment in the U.S. Marine Corps. When Richard went 28 days AWOL from Camp Lejeune, N.C., and then turned himself in, the sergeant in charge of the brig at Brooklyn Navy Yard handed him a train ticket back to Camp Lejeune along with: “Please jump the train – I want to get my hands on you just one more time.”
Ricky has been a bartender on cruise ships, a bouncer at Times Square nude clubs, a karate-trained kick boxer (“I was fast”), and, at the age of 47, a man taking his S.A.T.’s toward admission to Columbia University “in a roomful of people looking like they were 11.”
In May 2004, at the age of 54, Richard Hendricks was awarded his BA in English Literature at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, Columbia University.
Eternally
The little Egyptian-style statuette
He had from youth, left behind in his
Former bedroom on the dresser near
The pictures of his wife and children.
Now he rests forever, unseen on Earth,
A memory or just an unread name on cold
Granite in a field of dead flowers where
Anyone hardly ever walks and remembers.
His wife died three years before him,
His two sons and one daughter grew
To be a cold group of related strangers,
Even to him. How much he loved his wife
With her humor, grace, beauty, and easy wit,
But most of all he loved her kindness to him.
Her soul lives with the angels above, and he
Seeks the grace to reunite with her for eternity.
Millions
Angry souls
Millions
Hateful
Greedy,
Praising
A God Who
By their own
Religion would
Hate them.
Dream to Me
Dream to me, my love,
And I’ll dream to you.
We’ll build a house, my love,
Beyond the world others know.
And when we go inside and lock
The door, all will be happy
And simple and pure – just us two
In our world – together – alone –
A pair of people really as one.
One in a simple world all ours,
My love. Let us close the door
Now and dream to each other of life
As all ours, happiness as our private
Property, owned and jealously guarded.
