I had better hurry up and get these poems to you. They were all picked as special by the editors of The Atlantic Daily (9 April 2021 – accessed 12 April 2021). What kind of “special”? Nothing more or less than the theme of Spring. Why “hurry up”? We’re half way into the Spring of 2021, so I had better get busy, or it will be Summer. Granted, this Spring of 2021 has been slow in coming, at least in Minnesota, especially in Northwest Minnesota. So slow, in fact, that the change of seasons has been less noticeable than usual. Well, in any case, courtesy of the editors just mentioned, here are three of the poems to remind us that Winter is over.
Note on organization:
Background: Comments from the Atlantic staff and author background given after each of the poems.
Explorations: None this week. Please appreciate the poetry in your own way. Comments welcome.
So, put on your Spring Bonnet with pine boughs upon it, and enjoy these selections.
Uptown, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Hieu Miih Nguyen
Even though it’s May & the ice cream truck
parked outside my apartment is somehow certain,
I have a hard time believing winter is somehow,
all of a sudden, over — the worst one of my life,
the woman at the bank tells me. Though I’d like to be,
it’s impossible to be prepared for everything.
Even the mundane hum of my phone catches me
off guard today. Every voice that says my name
is a voice I don’t think I could possibly leave
(it’s unfair to not ask for the things you need)
even though I think about it often, even though
leaving is a train headed somewhere I’d probably hate.
Crossing Lyndale to meet a friend for coffee
I have to maneuver around a hearse that pulled too far
into the crosswalk. It’s empty. Perhaps spring is here.
Perhaps it will all be worth it. Even though I knew
even then it was worth it, staying, I mean.
Even now, there is someone, somehow, waiting for me.
Comment: This poem was published in 2018, but Nguyen perfectly captures pandemic spring: the seedlings of joy tentatively taking root, but also the pain that hasn’t been—won’t be—shed. I’ve been feeling a lot of different ways about reentering the post-pandemic world, but Nguyen’s words make me feel like it’s okay to throw my hands up and allow myself to be carried through time. Perhaps spring is here. / Perhaps it will all be worth it.
— Faith Hill, associate editor who helps select our Atlantic weekly poem
Bio: Hieu Minh Nguyen is a queer Vietnamese American poet and performer based in Minneapolis. He is the author of the poetry collections Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018) and This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), which was named a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the Minnesota Book Award. His work has appeared on the PBS Newshour and in Poetry magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed, Poetry London, Nashville Review, Indiana Review, among others. The recipient of a 2017 NEA fellowship for poetry, Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow, a poetry editor for Muzzle magazine, and an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. In 2018, Nguyen was awarded a the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.
Philip Larkin
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
Comment: Death is inescapable and irreversible. We all know this. But most of the time, the distracting affairs of daily life help conceal this certainty. The past year has been an anomaly and, partly for that reason, a remarkably taxing one. Unresting death, as Philip Larkin would put it, has stood ceaselessly at the door, making all thought impossible. “Aubade” captures the furnace-fear of our ultimate end in a chilling way. Yet in an unexpected twist, it also reminds us that despite overwhelming despair, work has to be done. — Ena Alvarado, a former assistant editor
Bio: Philip Larkin was born in Coventry, England in 1922. He earned his BA from St. John’s College, Oxford, where he befriended novelist and poet Kingsley Amis and finished with First Class Honors in English. After graduating, Larkin undertook professional studies to become a librarian. He worked in libraries his entire life, first in Shropshire and Leicester, and then at Queen’s College in Belfast, and finally as librarian at the University of Hull. In addition to collections of poetry, Larkin published two novels—Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947)—as well as criticism, essays, and reviews of jazz music.
Brynn Saito
Between the turtle rock and the crane rock
the children found me. I was shining and smooth
and silent about my secrets. One day above me
men with bony shoulders came and built the barracks.
Then I couldn’t see the sky for the rising camps
and I couldn’t feel the winds which whipped
between the ranges and I couldn’t see the ranges.
After a short time, voices moved in and I heard singing.
Months later, dancing. But mostly what caught me
was the quiet, concentrated chatter of elders:
How long before a working stove? How to make a garden
in this cradle of limestone? How to coax a stream
from the highest of peaks in the freest of nations
in this nation we sought for the blinding?
Some days no one heard the tears but I felt them.
They coated me like evidence of a prior sea.
I thought: this must be how the humans felt
when the rains broke above them every two hundred days
and the waters for once didn’t leak through their roofs
and they were happy.
Certainly a diverse group of poems. I thought they'd be poems about Spring, but you said poems 'for' Spring. The first one is about Spring, but the poet isn't able to enjoy Spring as usual because of his Covid winter. The Larkin poem is depressing. I looked him up and was happy for him that he's been dead since 1985. I don't get him. He always had a good job and people who loved him. It's a hangover poem. The last poem is about bad times on the home front during the war. The barracks will come down eventually and the rock will be able to enjoy the sunshine again.
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