Poems for Life (2 page)

For some of those children who once were lulled to sleep by the rhythms of Seuss and Sendak, poetry comes now set to music: Nirvana and Arrested Development, Tori Amos and the Indigo Girls. Many readers are scared off young, put off by the belief that poetry is difficult and demanding. We complain that it doesn't sound like the way we talk, but if it sounds like the way we talk, we complain that it doesn't rhyme.

A poet who teaches in the schools tells of how one boy told him he couldn't, wouldn't write poetry. Then one day in class he heard Hayden Carruth's “Cows at Night” and cried,
“I
didn't know we were allowed to write poems about cows.”

Or write a poem about two women talking in the kitchen.

Crazy as a bessy bug.

Jack wasn't cold

In his grave before

She done up & gave all

The insurance money

To some young pigeon

Who never hit a lick

At work in his life.

He cleaned her out & left

With Donna Faye's girl.

Honey, hush. You don't

Say …

That's Mr. Komunyakaa from the collection,
Neon Vernacular
, that won the Pulitzer. His publisher originally printed 2,500 copies, which is fairly large for poetry but a joke to the folks who stock those racks at the airport. Few are the parents who leap up with soundless joy when a son or daughter announces, “Mom, Dad, I've decided to become a poet.“

People who are knowledgeable about poetry sometimes discuss it in that knowing, rather hateful way in which enophiles talk about wine: robust, delicate, muscular. This has nothing to do with how most of us experience it, the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind. Of all the words that have stuck to the ribs of my soul, poetry has been the most filling. Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, the divine W. B. Yeats. April is the cruelest month. O World, I cannot hold thee close enough! After the first death, there is no other. A terrible beauty is born.

Poems are now appearing on posters in subway trains; one commuter said of a Langston Hughes poem, “I can't express it, but I get it.” Now rolling through the soot-black dark of the tunnels and the surprising sunshine where the subways suddenly shoot aboveground: Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Audre Lord, May Swenson, Rita Dove, and Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote that exquisite evocation of carpe diem, and perhaps of poetry, too:

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.

And be it gash or gold it will not come

Again in this identical disguise.

Says Mr. Komunyakaa, who teaches, “I never really approached it from the perspective of making a living. It was simply a need.” Maybe it's a need for us all we just forget.

Poems

for
Life

J
ANE
A
LEXANDER

Dear Ms. Rabbino,

Thank you for your letter, and I applaud your project as a means to raise funds for the International Rescue Committee to benefit refugee children.

You have asked me to give you a copy of my favorite poem. I have many favorite poems, but I read one the other day that is my current favorite and I thought you might wish to include it in your book. The poem, “In Black Earth, Wisconsin,” was written by Andrea Musher. I read it in a recently published anthology of poems by Dane County writers of Wisconsin. The anthology is called
The Glacier Stopped Here
, published by the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission and Isthmus Publishing Company in 1994.

The poem is my favorite presently because it paints for me a picture of this very specific Wisconsin country. I get a clear picture of the farm, the mother and family and the graveyard at the top of the hill. It evokes for me a particular time and an almost unbearable emotional path that this mother and family have taken.

Poems are perhaps my favorite kind of reading because they encapsulate in a few descriptive lines a world — a world that I may never get to visit but which, somehow, recalls for me the common ground we all stand on.

All the best with your project.

Sincerely,

I
N
B
LACK
E
ARTH
, W
ISCONSIN

thistles take the hillside

a purple glory of furred spears

a fierce army of spiky weeds

we climb through them

your mother, two of her daughters, and me

a late walk in the long June light

in the barn the heart throb

of the milking machine continues

as your father and brother change

the iodide-dipped tubes

from one udder to the next

and the milk courses through the pipeline

to the cooling vat where it swirls

like a lost sea in a silver box

we are climbing to the grove of white birch trees

whose papery bark will shed

the heart-ringed initials of your sister

as the grief wears down

this farm bears milk and hay

and this mother woman walking beside us

has borne nine children

a year and a half has passed

and death is folded in among the dishtowels

hangs in the hall closet by the family photos

and like a ring of fine mist

above the dinner table

we stand on a hill looking at birch bark

poking among hundred-year-old graves

that have fallen into the grass

rubbing the moss off and feeling for the names

that the stone sheds

we are absorbing death like nitrates

fertilizing our growth

already there are four grandchildren

the family grows thick as thistle

—Andrea Musher

B
ROOKE
A
STOR

Thank you for your letter of April 24th. I think your class project sounds wonderful and I hope it is an enormous success.

My favorite poem is “The Daffodil“ by William Wordsworth because it is lighthearted and gay and brings to mind such beautiful images. In the Spring, my garden is filled with golden daffodils which are a glorious sight to behold, and when the winter comes, I can close my eyes and see them “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” and my heart is uplifted and filled with joy. I have enclosed a copy of the poem for your book.

I W
ANDERED
L
ONELY
A
S
A C
LOUD

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils,

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed — and gazed — but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

— William Wordsworth

K
EN
A
ULETTA

Dear Maggie,

Among my favorite poems, one is certainly Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind,” with its rich optimism: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

Read it, and cheer.

H
AROLYN
M. B
LACKWELL

Dearest Olivia,

Thank you so much for your note. I'm sorry for the delay. Life has been rather hectic recently.

However, I've enclosed a poem by Langston Hughes called “To Be Somebody.” I love this poem because of the inspiration it has given me as an artist struggling, striving and working to make it to the top of my profession. The beauty of the poem is that there is always room for each and every one of us at the top.

Many Thanks, Best Wishes and Great Success.

Sincerely,