poetry friday: #shelterinpoetry

Hello farflung poets, teachers and lovers of poetry...
all is at a standstill, and yet you have arrived. 

Linda Mitchell of A Word Edgewise has challenged the Sunday Swaggers to participate in the poets.org #ShelterInPoems project, which asks us to "share a poem that helps to find courage, solace and actionable energy, and a few words about how or why it does so." Then we were to write a companion poem.

Their suggestion is to use one of the many wonderful poems on the poets.org site, but as I rearranged my Library Lounge at home to become Zoom-worthy "PreK Online," I found a sheltery poem in a Billy Collins book I received as a birthday gift.

Have you, like me, noticed many people looking back fondly, in their confinement to better times?  Looking back to when all the grays were covered, when the children were small and adorable, when we could go places side-by-side, or go places at all?  People are sheltering in the past.


Nostalgia | Billy Collins
     from Questions About Angels (1991)

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle

N for no, S for school

while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.

The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.

People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.

I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees

and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,

letting my memory rush over them like water

rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.

I was even thinking a little about the future, that place

where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,

a dance whose name we can only guess.

*****************************************************

Are those Facebook folks looking at old photos also thinking, like me, a little about the future, "that place/where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine"?  

Other people have sheltered in ignorance and selfishness, walking about with their heads and hearts  in the sand.  But, as my minister said a couple weeks ago:

THIS IS WHERE WE ARE,

AND THIS IS WHAT WE'RE DOING.

And we should be brave about it!  I thought very briefly about the companion poem I might write, and then I found this poem by H.D.  I thought about what we are learning even as we shelter in place.  When all this is past, will we remember that to live "wadded in cloth...smothered in straw" might not be better than to "taste of frost—the exquisite frost," than to "find a new beauty/ in some terrible/wind-tortured place"?

Sheltered Garden | H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

I have had enough.

I gasp for breath.

Every way ends, every road,

every foot-path leads at last

to the hill-crest—

then you retrace your steps,

or find the same slope on the other side,

precipitate.

I have had enough—

border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,

herbs, sweet-cress.

O for some sharp swish of a branch—

there is no scent of resin

in this place,

no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,

aromatic, astringent—

only border on border of scented pinks.

Have you seen fruit under cover

that wanted light—

pears wadded in cloth,

protected from the frost,

melons, almost ripe,

smothered in straw?

Why not let the pears cling

to the empty branch?

All your coaxing will only make

a bitter fruit—

let them cling, ripen of themselves,

test their own worth,

nipped, shrivelled by the frost,

to fall at last but fair

with a russet coat.

Or the melon—

let it bleach yellow

in the winter light,

even tart to the taste—

it is better to taste of frost—

the exquisite frost—

than of wadding and of dead grass.

For this beauty,

beauty without strength,

chokes out life.

I want wind to break,

scatter these pink-stalks,

snap off their spiced heads,

painting by Gregoire Boonzaier

fling them about with dead leaves—

spread the paths with twigs,

limbs broken off,

trail great pine branches,

hurled from some far wood

right across the melon-patch,

break pear and quince—

leave half-trees, torn, twisted

but showing the fight was valiant.

O to blot out this garden

to forget, to find a new beauty

in some terrible

wind-tortured place.

**********************************************************************************

You can see other Swaggers' responses to the box challenge at their blogs:

-Catherine at Reading to the Core -Margaret at Reflections on the Teche -Molly at Nix the Comfort Zone
-Linda at A Word Edgewise

I hope you all find some #ShelterInPoems this month, or that you unwrap yourself (metaphorically) and step into some valiant fight.  For my part, now that I have my own personal YouTube channel, I'm going to celebrate National Poetry Month by posting a video reading of one of my own poems each day (starting tomorrow when I have recovered from a massive overload of distance-learning screen time).  Do you perhaps have a favorite to request?

AND NOW...the Round-Up.  Add your link, and be well, friends.

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