David Katz introduces Henry Weinfield’s “When the Dark Days Come”, and “As the Crow Flies”, both appearing in The David M. Katz Poetry Blog.
When the dark days come, what will remain?” Henry Weinfield was reciting to me a year or so ago over dinner at an Italian Restaurant on the Upper West Side. “Will everything you’ve done seem done in vain[?”] The poem gave me the chills, as if accusing me of never really having lived, of never having confronted some unstated but essential problem in my life. Of course “When the Dark Days Come,” which you can read below, is at bedrock a self-accusation by the speaker, or perhaps an indictment of the poet himself by himself, a notion that becomes clear when we note the particularity implicit in “What of your wife, your daughters, and your son?” Henry and I have been friends for a half-century, and it would be impossible for me not to grasp that that is the exact structure of this poet’s own family.
