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April 2: Philip Levine’s “Unholy Saturday”
A return to childhood with Philip Levine, who is now in his eighties, and whose Detroit, before, during, and after the Second World War, has become a classic, frequently revisited setting in American poetry.
Unholy Saturday
Three boys down by the river
search for crawdads. One has
hammered a spear from a
curtain rod, and head down,
jeans rolled up to his knees, wades
against the river’s current.
Barely seven, he’s the most
determined. He’ll go home
hours from now with nothing
to show for his efforts except
dirt and sweat and that residue
he’s unaware of sifting
down from a distant sky
and glinting like threads
of mica across his shoulders.
In the distance someone keeps
calling the names of the brothers
in the same order over
and over, but they don’t hear
what with the riverbank gorged
with blue weed patches and all
the birds in hiding. Perhaps no
one is calling and it’s only
the voices of the air as
the late light of June hangs on
in the cottonwoods before
the dark whispers the last word.
Learn more about News of the World by Philip Levine
10 Responses to “April 2: Philip Levine’s “Unholy Saturday””
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Knopf's Poem-A-Day 2011
April 1: The opening lines of Amy Tan's "I Love a Broad Margin"April 2: Philip Levine's "Unholy Saturday"
April 3: Deborah Digges's "The Coat"
April 4: David Young's "The House Was Quiet on a Winter Afternoon"
April 5: W.S. Merwin's "The Folding Cliffs"
April 6: Cynthia Zarin's "Late Poem"
April 7: Leonard Cohen's "These Heroics"
April 8: Marge Piercy's "Wellfleet Shabbat"
April 9: Anthony Hecht's "Devotions of a Painter"
April 10: Emily Dickinson Letters
April 11: Kevin Young's "Ash Wednesday"
April 12: Edward Hirsch's "Happiness Writes White"
April 13: Amy Clampitt's "Green"
April 14: Walt Whitman's "The Artilleryman’s Vision"
April 15: Wallace Stevens's "A Dove in the Belly"
April 16: James Merrill's "The Candid Decorator"
April 17: Emily Brontë's "No coward soul is mine"
April 18: Julia Hartwig's "Yet We Desire It above All"
April 19: Kenneth Koch's "To My Fifties"
April 20: Stephen Sondheim's "Green Finch and Linnet Bird"
April 21: Stan Rice's "Tornado at Night"
April 22: Kwon Homun's "Two Poems On Fishing"
April 23: Franz Wright's "Rooms"
April 24: Brooks Haxton’s “Three Lilies”
April 25: C.P. Cavafy's "The Mirror in the Entrance"
April 26: W. B. Yeats's "Down by the Salley Gardens"
April 27: Peter Davison's "The Level Path"
April 28: Sharon Olds's "True Love"
April 29: Langston Hughes's "Daybreak in Alabama"
April 30: Farewell, with poems by Jane Hirshfield and Simon Armitage
Knopf's Poem-A-Day 2010
April 1: Edward Hirsch’s “Self-portrait”April 2: Marge Piercy’s “Seven Horses”
April 3: Dan Chiasson’s “Banquette” and “Next”
April 4: Marie Ponsot’s “Transport”
April 5: Alexander Neubauer’s Poetry in Person, featuring Derek Walcott
April 6: Mark Strand’s “Mirror”
April 7: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Spring”
April 8: Philip Levine’s “MY FATHERS, THE BALTIC”
April 9: Vera Pavlova’s “A Remedy for Insomnia”
April 10: Stan Rice’s “The Fragment of Statue”
April 11: Marina Tsvetayeva’s “Poems Grow”
April 12: Kevin Young’s “EYES + EGGS [1983]“
April 13: Janusz Szuber’s “About a Boy Stirring Jam”
April 14: Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”
April 15: Franz Wright’s "My Pew"
April 16: Mary Jo Salter’s “Welcome to Hiroshima”
April 17: Yehuda Halevi’s “A man in your fifties—and you still would be young?”
April 18: Langston Hughes’s “Black Workers” and “Black Dancers”
April 19: W. S. Di Piero’s “In Our Room”
April 20: Robert Wrigley’s “Kissing a Horse”
April 21: Sharon Olds’s “When He Came for the Family” and “The Signal”
April 22: Irving Feldman’s “Stretched Out at Length”
April 23: W.S. Merwin’s “The Furrow”
April 24: David Lehman’s “Poem in the Manner of a Jazz Standard”
April 25: John Keats’s “This Living Hand”
April 26: Laurie Sheck’s A Monster’s Notes
April 27: Garrett Hongo’s “Volcano House”
April 28: Wallace Stevens’s “Large Red Man Reading”
April 29: Izumi Shikibu’s love poems
April 30: Deborah Digges's "Write a Book a Year"
Knopf's Poem-a-Day 2009
April 1: Half Moon, Small Cloud by John UpdikeApril 2: Going Back to Bed by J.D. McClatchy
April 3: Like Giving to a Blind Man Eyes by Ruth Padel
April 4: Waiting On Elvis, 1956 by Joyce Carol Oates
April 5: Exile’s Child by D. Nurkse
April 6: A Summer Outing by Du Fu
April 7: Touch-Me-Nots by Jill Bialosky
April 8: Sweet Voices and Voices by C.P. Cavafy
April 9: On the Jetty by C.P. Cavafy
April 10: Fragment on Dissembling by Lucie Brock-Broido
April 11: Page From the Koran by James Merrill
April 12: Spring Song II by Jean Garrigue
April 13: Ode to Pepper Vinegar by Kevin Young
April 14: Greeter of Souls by Deborah Digges
April 15: You’re Beautiful by Simon Armitage
April 16: Two Short Poems by Mark Strand
April 17: To See My Mother by Sharon Olds
April 18: Wallace Stevens and Donald Justice
April 19: Robert Lowell’s Poetry Class by Stephanie Hemphill
April 20: Storm by Brooks Haxton
April 21: A Good List by Brad Leithauser
April 22: The Pond by Jim Powell
April 23: Impressions of Africa by Kenneth Koch
April 24: Notes For Sixtieth Wedding Anniversary by Jane Mayhall
April 25: Some Playthings by John Hollander
April 26: There is No City that Does Not Dream by Anne Michaels
April 27: Description of Her Eyes by Franz Wright
April 28: Some Different Kinda Books by Sapphire
April 29: The Mistake by Jack Gilbert
April 30: Creeper and Fine Point by John Updike
May 1: Written Late at Night by Janusz Szuber
I like this poem — beautiful mood, clear images — but not sure what it’s about. What happened to the other two boys? Did they drown? Or nothing that dramatic? Were they brothers? Did only one get home? Can someone interpret, please?
I hate to love this poem!
It lives up to its title against the reader’s
mounting positive expectation.
At the end, both the reader’s and the poet’s
voices drown.
Sad Excellence!
I absolutely love it! Reminds me of my sons when they were small!
Philip Levine’s poem “Unholy Saturday” helps me recall my Saturdays along the jumpable creeks and rock strewn tributaries of the Agawam River in Massachusetts. Yes, the glint of mica flakes is as unforgettable as it is to remove from skin. It seems to lay in the pores. A good reason for a Saturday evening bath.
RLL
that residue
he’s unaware of sifting
down from a distant sky
and glinting like threads
of mica across his shoulders
These lines give me shivers. So perfect. I think the poet is the small boy. Far from unholy, the natural setting and the total absorbtion of the boy is almost spiritual, perhaps zen-like, so absorbed is he in his evnironment.
“Unholy” seem the wrong word to describe this beautiful poem.
I see the mica filtering down from the sky as radioactive dust (satan) in the mix.
I think the reference to the mica is simply the dew. If one interprets it as something heavenly, fine, but I’m not sure the poet meant it like that. But such is the dynamic between reader and writer. The poem is actually quite prosaic up to this point. The poetry for me begins at “In the distance someone keeps calling…” The words ‘distance’ coming so soon after ‘distant’ is a bit careless, however.
Also the reference to ‘all the birds in hiding’ is puzzling since it is meant to be part of the reason the boys can’t hear themselves being called.
The phrase ‘hangs on in..’ is a bit awkward and could be reworded I think.
Finally I would have preferred ‘a last word’ or ‘its last word’ rather than ‘the last word’.
The poem seems to float along as naturally as the river the boy is knee-high in. It’s a vrey special song.
Beautiful! It reminds me, too, of being a child and playing out in the lake, woods, wherever I could get away. I was thinking the mica was the sun making it’s mark on the young boys as they fished. Of course they did not hear the voices calling them: they were too absorbed in what they were trying to accomplish. Nature has a magic that engages young people, especially…