Boy With His Hair Cut Short - Poem by Muriel

Rukeyser

SUNDAY shuts down on this twentieth-century evening.

The L passes. Twilight and bulb define
the brown room, the overstuffed plum sofa,
the boy, and the girl's thin hands above his head.
A neighbor radio sings stocks, news, serenade.

He sits at the table, head down, the young clear neck exposed,
watching the drugstore sign from the tail of his eye;
tattoo, neon, until the eye blears, while his
solicitous tall sister, simple in blue, bending
behind him, cuts his hair with her cheap shears.

The arrow's electric red always reaches its mark,

successful neon! He coughs, impressed by that precision.
His child's forehead, forever protected by his cap,
is bleached against the lamplight as he turns head
and steadies to let the snippets drop.

Erasing the failure of weeks with level fingers,

she sleeks the fine hair, combing: 'You'll look fine tomorrow!
You'll surely find something, they can't keep turning you down;
the finest gentleman's not so trim as you!' Smiling, he raises
the adolescent forehead wrinkling ironic now.

He sees his decent suit laid out, new-pressed,

his carfare on the shelf. He lets his head fall, meeting
her earnest hopeless look, seeing the sharp blades splitting,
the darkened room, the impersonal sign, her motion,
the blue vein, bright on her temple, pitifully beating.
About the author
Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) was an American poet and political
activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth
Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation."
One of her most powerful pieces was a group of poems titled The Book of the Dead (1938),
documenting the details of the Hawk's Nest incident, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of
miners died of silicosis.
Her poem "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century" (1944), on the theme of Judaism as a gift, was
adopted by the American Reform and Reconstructionist movements for their prayer books,
something Rukeyser said "astonished" her, as she had remained distant from Judaism throughout
her early life.[1]

Early life
Muriel Rukeyser was born on December 15, 1913 to Lawrence and Myra Lyons Rukeyser.[2] She
attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private school in The Bronx, then Vassar
College in Poughkeepsie. From 1930 to 32, she attended Columbia University.
Her literary career began in 1935 when her book of poetry Theory of Flight, based on flying lessons
she took, was chosen by the American poet Stephen Vincent Benét for publication in the Yale
Younger Poets Series.

Activism and writing

Rukeyser was active in progressive politics throughout her life. At age 21, she covered
the Scottsboro case in Alabama, then worked for the International Labor Defense, which handled the
defendants' appeals. She wrote for the Daily Worker and a variety of publications,
including Decision and Life & Letters Today, for which she covered the People's
Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular, Barcelona), the Catalan government's alternative to the Nazis' 1936
Berlin Olympics. While she was in Spain, the Spanish Civil War broke out, the basis of her
book Mediterranean. Most famously, she traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, to investigate the
recurring silicosis among miners there, which resulted in her poem sequence The Book of the Dead.
During and after World War II, she gave a number of striking public lectures, published in her The
Life of Poetry (excerpts here). For much of her life, she taught university classes and led workshops,
but she never became a career academic.
In 1996, Paris Press reissued The Life of Poetry, which was published in 1949 but had fallen out of
print. In a publisher's note, Jan Freeman called it a book that "ranks among the most essential works
of twentieth century literature." In it Rukeyser makes the case that poetry is essential to democracy,
essential to human life and understanding.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when Rukeyser presided over PEN's American center, her feminism and
opposition to the Vietnam War drew a new generation to her poetry. The title poem of her last
book, The Gates, is based on her unsuccessful attempt to visit Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha on death
row in South Korea. In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to
refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[4]
In addition to her poetry, she wrote a fictionalized memoir, The Orgy, plays and screenplays, and
translated work by Octavio Paz and Gunnar Ekelöf. She also wrote biographies of Josiah Willard
Gibbs, Wendell Willkie, and Thomas Hariot. Andrea Dworkin worked as her secretary in the early
1970s. Also in the 1970s she served on the Advisory Board of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist
Collective, a New York City based theatre group that wrote and produced plays on feminist issues.
Rukeyser died in New York on February 12, 1980, from a stroke, with diabetes as a contributing
factor. She was 66.