17 May 21 – Poems for Late Spring – 2021 – from The Atlantic Daily

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.

Aubade

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.

Stone

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.

Comment: One day above me / men with bony shoulders came and built the barracks, Brynn Saito writes in “Stone,” a poem that bears witness to Japanese internment from the perspective of a rock. Saito often explores Japanese American history through a personal lens, but here, she uses an inanimate object to help readers access the pain—and resilience—of those interned. This year, I’ve felt that the country has started to reckon more fully with its legacy of racism toward Asian Americans. Like the stone in this poem, I hope that more people will see themselves not as a bystander, but as a listener and an empath.

— Morgan Ome, assistant editor

Bio: Brynn Saito is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and forthcoming from Red Hen Press (March, 2013). Her poetry has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, and Drunken Boat. Brynn was born in the Central Valley of California to a Korean American mother and a Japanese American father. She received an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in religious studies from NYU. Currently, Brynn lives in the Bay Area and teaches in San Francisco.