Richard W. Halperin‘s poetry is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher and by Lapwing/Belfast and Ballyhalbert. A New poem from his November 2025 Salmon collection All the Tattered Stars: Selected & New Poems was The Poem of the Week in The Guardian, January 19, and the books itself was one of three finalists for Best Poetry Book Award for 2025 in the Poetry by the Sea Conference, Madison, Connecticut, Rachel Hadas adjudicator. Many of Mr Halperin’s readings are on video in the internet, e.g., First Wednesday/White House Bar Limerick January 2026, Heinrich Böll Memorial weekend/Achill May 2024.

Some Walk with Sticks

 

     ‘When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound/

     A shining web . . . . ‘ 

  • Yeats, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’

 

They are still enwinding. I think of that

as I look at the cover of a small notebook

from the Louvre which my friend Joe 

just gave me: a beautifully reproduced

coloured-ink Chinese scene from long ago.

Several hundred people in a town on

a wide curving river, some rowing skiffs, 

some pouring over a bridge to a marketplace, 

some standing on the porches of houses,

some walking with sticks, and – toward

the bottom of the immense swirl – 

four bearers carrying an aristocrat on 

a pale blue palanquin.

 

I think of Herodias’s remark to Herod

in Wilde’s Salome as he offers the girl

‘my white peacocks, my beautiful 

white peacocks’ in hopes of dissuading her 

from insisting on the head of John the Baptist: 

‘You are ridiculous with your peacocks.’ 

 

I am ridiculous with my centuries. 

 

Can we not carry Yeats on a pale blue 

palanquin? He weighs nothing at all 

and neither do we.

What the Real Looks Like

 

Marianne Moore, in her three-cornered hat,

on late-night television in 1960. 

The Jack Paar Show. Let to talk on any subject. 

What the real looks like. Is.

 

Christina Rossetti in Virginia Woolf’s 

essay ‘I am Christina Rossetti.’ Aspects, 

perfectly caught, of the inner life of

one poet. Then an anecdote: A tea-party.

Christina Rossetti, completely silent, 

one of the guests. Talk and talk, 

about poetry. Suddenly she rises from 

her chair, walks to the centre of the room, 

says, ‘I am Christina Rossetti,’ returns to

her chair and sits down. 

 

A podcast – I live in France – of an event 

in 1993, at the huge Vél-Hiv, Paris. 

A fiftieth anniversary remembrance of 

the forced gathering there of men, women 

and children, to send them, unknowing,

to the camps. President Mitterand and his 

Minister of Justice Robert Badinter arrive

and are attacked and jeered at for some issue 

entirely unrelated to the event. Badinter, 

frenzied, mounts the podium and screams, 

‘Vous m’avez fait honte!’ You made me 

ashamed. I expected anything but this. 

The dead call us here. The dead hear us

in their silence. If you don’t believe that, 

get out! Get out! ‘Vous m’avez fait honte!’

The prophets were like that. Amos. 

Prophets are like that. Are. 

Tipping the Mask

 

The Nōh actor wears 

an ancient wooden mask. 

Sometimes he tips the mask

very slightly up, to express 

joy. Sometimes he tips it 

very slightly down, to express

grief. Most of the time, 

he does not tip the mask.

 

He can portray,

not so much through 

costumes as through 

minimal gestures,

a terrified girl,

a ferocious warrior, 

a raving lunatic,

a remote deity, 

a pine tree, 

or their spirits. 

 

Tipping the mask. 

I sometimes did that, 

at age ten. I sometimes 

made minimal gestures,

when I could overcome

excruciating timidity. 

Some spectators noticed, 

or didn’t.

 

In Wisconsin. Plenty of 

pine trees there.