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

Did you read the three poems for Spring from The Atlantic Daily posted here one week ago today? If so, did you follow directions and put on your cap “with all the frills upon it”? If yes, this post treats you to more – but different – poets writing in the Spring mood. Yep, it’s still Spring for another month. As I write this, we are finally getting those long-delayed April showers. Out here in Beltrami Island Forest, the forest floor is less crunchy, the fiddlehead ferns are finally poppy up, and the dogs come in muddy-wonderful. It’s Spring all right.     Finally.

Note on organization – same format as last week:

Background: Comments from the Atlantic staff and author bios given after each of the poems.

Explorations: None this week. Please appreciate the poetry in your own way. Comments welcome.

Praise Song for the Day

By Elizabeth Alexander

        A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration

Each day we go about our business,

walking past each other, catching each other’s

eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is

noise and bramble, thorn, and din, each

one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning

a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,

repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,

with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,

with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky.

A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words

spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,

words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark

the will of someone and then others, who said

I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.

We need to find a place where we are safe.

We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,

who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built

brick by brick the glittering edifices

they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.

Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,

the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,

others by first do no harm or take no more

than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,

love that casts a widening pool of light,

love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,

any thing can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Comment: Last week, Amanda Gorman published her spell-binding inaugural poem, and it had me thinking about the tradition of inaugural poems that her’s is a part of. One that came to mind in particular was Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day.” Alexander is one of my favorite writers, and this poem, written as Barack Obama took office in January 2009, captures the dynamics of that moment in ways that remain resonant. Say it plain: that many have died for this day. / Sing the names of the dead who brought us here. I think of these lines often, and they have been on my mind again recently as we begin to emerge from a year wrought with tragedy and casualties. — Clint Smith, staff writer 

Bio: Elizabeth Alexander was born in Harlem, New York, but grew up in Washington, DC, the daughter of former United States Secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chairman, Clifford Alexander Jr. She holds degrees from Yale, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her PhD. She is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. She is the former Chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale University. Alexander is a highly respected scholar, teacher, and mentor, as well as a founding member of Cave Canem, an organization dedicated to promoting African American poets and poetry. 

Draft of a Modern Love Poem 

By Tadeusz Rozewwicz

translated by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire

And yet white

is best described by gray

bird by stone

sunflowers

in December

love poems of old

were descriptions of the flesh

described this and that

for instance eyelashes

and yet red

should be described

by gray the sun by rain

poppies in November

lips by night

the most tangible

description of bread

is a description of hunger

in it is

the damp porous core

the warm interior

sunflowers at night

the breasts belly thighs of Cybele

a spring-clear

transparent description

of water

is a description of thirst

ashes

desert

it produces a mirage

clouds and trees move into

the mirror

Lack hunger

absence

of flesh

is a description of love

is a modern love poem

Comment: It’s a weird spring. Our freedom depends on our restraint. Until I’m vaccinated, I keep my family and friends safe by staying apart: Lack hunger / absence / of flesh / is a description of love… The Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz called Różewicz “a poet of chaos with a nostalgia for order”—perfect for a paradoxical April, suspended between a vanished “normal” and the bright unknown. — Jen Adams, associate director of production.

Bio: Różewicz is considered by many to be the most influential poet in postwar Poland. His writings are stripped bare of rhetorical excesses and his purpose is simply to create “not verses but facts”. Incidentally, these facts have turned into even more powerful metaphors. Milosz once said of him, “Różewicz is a poet of chaos with a nostalgia for order”.

Spring and All [By the Road to the Contagious Hospital]

By William Carlos Williams

By the road to the contagious hospital

under the surge of the blue

mottled clouds driven from the

northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the

waste of broad, muddy fields

brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water

the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish

purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy

stuff of bushes and small trees

with dead, brown leaves under them

leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish

dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,

cold, uncertain of all

save that they enter. All about them

the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow

the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—

It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of

entrance—Still, the profound change

has come upon them: rooted, they

grip down and begin to awaken

As a poetry fan who also lives with chronic illness, I’ve always appreciated how William Carlos Williams, a doctor by day, oriented what is unknowable—the whys and hows and how longs of our existence—by way of what is: the things we see. “Spring and All” begins in a place similar to the one we’re in now, somewhere between contagion and the world beyond it. We’ve all experienced loss; as in Williams’s landscape, a cold wind has touched everything. But hope is approaching. We don't yet know exactly what this next season will look like; the world, Williams reminds us, changes, at first, slowly. But this spring, more than ever, profound change has indeed come upon us. — Lindsey Baker, copy editor

Bio: On September 17, 1883, William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. He began writing poetry while a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to become both a writer and a doctor. He received his MD from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound.

Pound became a great influence on his writing, and in 1913 arranged for the London publication of Williams's second collection, The Tempers. Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright.

. . . Williams's health began to decline after a heart attack in 1948 and a series of strokes, but he continued writing up until his death in New Jersey on March 4, 1963.