Saturday's Poem: The Hero's Journey

The Hero’s Journey

                         I remember the first time I looked at the spotless marble floor
    of a giant hotel lobby
        and understood that someone had waxed and polished it all night

and that someone else had pushed his cart of cleaning supplies
    down the long air-conditioned corridors
        of the Steinberg Building across the street

and emptied all two hundred and forty-three wastebaskets
    stopping now and then to scrape up chewing gum
        with a special flat-bladed tool
                                                                       he keeps in his back pocket.

It tempered my enthusiasm for “The Collected Sonnets of Hugh
     Pembley-Witherton”
           and for Kurt von Heinzelman’s “Epic of the Seekers for the Grail,”

Chapter 5, “The Trial,” in which he describes how the
    “tall and fair-complexioned” knight, Gawain,
           makes camp one night beside a windblown cemetery

but cannot sleep for all the voices
                                                  rising up from underground—

Let him stay out there a hundred nights, the little wonder boy,
    with his thin blanket and his cold armor and his
                                                                           useless sword,
until he understands exactly how
    the glory of the protagonist is always paid for
                                                      by a lot of secondary characters.

In the morning he will wake and gallop back to safety;
    he will hear his name embroidered into toasts and songs.

But now he knows there is a country he had not accounted for,
    and that country has its citizens:

the one-armed baker sweeping out his shop at 4 a.m.;

soldiers fitting every horse in Prague with diapers
                                                            before the emperor’s arrival;

and that woman in the nursing home,
    who has worked there for a thousand years,

taking away the bedpans,
    lifting up and wiping off the soft heroic buttocks of Odysseus.                                                          

Note from Cynthia: I read this poem by Tony Hoagland in the New Yorker several months ago, and I immediately loved it.

I think it's a beautiful tribute to all the humble, hardworking "secondary characters" throughout history who tend to the unglamorous and essential work without fanfare or recognition.