Welcome, all, to your March 10th-not-yet-15th Poetry Roundup. I'm here first to share some poetry history with a few selections that may be considered the Odes of March, and then to share a couple of my own before you share your offerings for today. Let's get jigging!
Elizabethan: Edmund Spenser
| How bragly it beginnes to budde, |
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| And utter his tender head? | 15 |
| Flora now calleth forth eche flower, |
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| And bids make ready Maias bowre, |
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| That newe is upryst from bedde. |
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| Tho shall we sporten in delight, |
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| And learne with Lettice to wexe light, | | | |
Romantic: John Clare
Yet winter seems half weary of its toil
And round the ploughman on the elting soil
Will thread a minutes sunshine wild and warm
Thro the raggd places of the swimming storm
Victorian: Algernon Charles Swinburne
Fain, fain would we see but again for an hour what the wind and the sun have dispelled and consumed,
Dear March—Come in—
How glad I am—
I hoped for you before—
Put down your Hat—
You must have walked—
How out of Breath you are—
Turn-of-the-Century: Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Severe of face, gaunt-armed, and wildly dressed,
She is not fair nor beautiful to see.
But merry April and sweet smiling May
Come not till March has first prepared the way.
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
The moon is naked.
The wind has undressed the moon.
The wind has blown all the cloud-garments
Off the body of the moon
And now she’s naked,
Midcentury: Anne Sexton
Because of this
the ground, that winter nightmare,
has cured its sores and burst
with green birds and vitamins.
21st Century: Catherine Pond
Sometimes the medicine works
and sometimes it doesn’t. The fact remains
that it’s warmer than ever: 76 degrees today
in Central Park. A silver maple burns beneath
the bridge. A sailboat comes apart in the pond.
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And now, a couple of odes to March 11, because my birthday gift to myself is hosting you all here at my juicy little universe.
3.11.11
10,000 miles from Fukushima
On my birthday this year I turn
into an ostrich
take a shallow breath and bury my head
in a desert of pixelated particles.
Am I the pivotal generation,
the last of the predigital baby boom
weaned on Sesame Street and Electric Company
Zoom Z-double O-M slipping into the future?
Do I regret my thrill and amazement that in one office
of the university I typed on carbon sets
while in the science library I clicked a key,
ejected research papers from a hulking printer?
Do I regret the newborn internet, how
electronic mail let me cross generations,
3000 miles and an ocean to explain “bisexual”
to my father sheltered from proximal storms of hurt?
I thought these things were like cassette tapes,
microwave ovens and MTV: tool-using humans
applying their powerful brains to create
simple solutions for better living.
If I had known what we would become, what
my children would become, I would have said no
to these harmless, genius tools–no to the cell phone
and the laptop, no to the internet and to Facebook.
A hole is to dig, and I want to go into the field
with you, my children, and you, my child.
I want to use my hands, my muscles, my fingernails
like tools, like humans, to dig a hole
that I can bury us in together, just for a while,
while the scandals and the earthquakes
and the tsunamis and the secret maneuvering
make us forget that from that dirt
seeds will sprout and bulbs will burst,
fission at the nuclear level, a splitting of
ostrich eggs
unearthing us 3D and breathtaking again.
The Green Sofa of Ezra Jack Keats (born 3.11.1916)
is where I sat every Wednesday night for weeks, writing, in
a tiny apartment not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
where Claudia and Jamie slept on the canopied 16th century bed,
which was not far from the brownstone on East 87th Street
where Harriet had cake and milk, milk and cake every afternoon.
I didn’t know in 1986 that it was the green sofa of Ezra Jack Keats.
I did not realize he had only just left us, and left the green sofa
to this young family friend, a writer. I settled into that green sofa
of Ezra Jack Keats, into a colored collage that dizzied, did not need
to pin everything down, showed me not cool consumption
but cozy creation, how I might go beyond black and white
with a narrow red stripe, how I need not grow up according
to the Plan but might run away alone like Sam Gribley
carrying the contents of the New York Public Library in my head,
to a place of my own making, like Peter on the sidewalk with
all his most important things, a picture of me as a baby.
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Add your link below, and thanks for Marching with me all these years!
You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!
