“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date”
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet”
Perhaps the most recognizable piece of poetry ever written, giving truth to its couplet “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” Curious that for a love song, it refers so rarely to the inamorata.
Since January 1 of this year, I have been choosing a poem a day for my own personal indulgence.
Poetry, like art, is always a personal indulgence. You like a poem because you have heard it before or because your mother read it to you or because it reminds you of a friend. You like a poem because there is a clever rhyme or a haunting image. You like a poem because the message sits in your soul.
The hardest part of collecting a poem for each day had not been finding a poem, although admittedly it is still early in the year. It has been examining the verse and myself to try to understand why I have included it; why the poem is meaningful enough that I wanted it to be a part of my year.
My log follows no pattern, although I have on occasion chosen timely poems (Amanda Gorman's magnificent Inaugural ode on January 21 for instance). I also have toyed with the idea of themed days (Silly Fridays for nonsense rhyme, Ripping Saturdays for story poems, etc) but have found it hard to stay on those rigid tracks. I have excerpted the beginning of each poem, even if the most famous line is later in the piece, because I believe that a poem has to be read in entirety to have integrity. So on January 18 my entry read:
“Thou still unravished bride of
quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence
and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly
than our rhyme”
Not even a mention of Keats's most famous line, the couplet at the end "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all you need to know." I hope that if a poem moves you, you will seek out the whole. Discovering a work of art is one of life's sweetest moments.
My entry for March 11:
“it’s 1962 March 28th
I’m sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain
I don’t like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird”
Nazim Hikmet, “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved”
I chanced on this charming poem while looking for another. It rambles a bit but
tells the story of a life to a rail car rhythm as a series of contradictions and
discoveries.
The problem with doing anything alphabetically is that you
must run into that vestigial menace, the letter X.
There are precious few words that start with the benighted
letter. Even my trusty Shorter Oxford Dictionary only devotes three pages. The
word ‘xenophobia’ may be timely but in my mind, it is horribly pretentious. And
even I can’t spin a useful yarn about the many variations of the prefix “xantho”
(meaning yellow).
Instead, I’m going to write about Sesame Street. Bear with
me. There is a connection.
Although I am slightly old to be a Sesame Street child, I
will confess to watching it with religious fascination when I was younger. Even
at nine or ten-years, there was something comfortable about the familiar rote
lessons and the easy puzzles (I could tell “which of these things is not like
the others” with the best of them). Beyond that, there was the sense of warmth and
family that the show projected, a sort of cradling in a safe environment that
even a jaded peri-teen could relish.
I discovered the show around the time of a turbulent family
move from New York to Boston. In my new turf, I didn’t know the streets or the
shops or even the television stations. I had no friends at first. But there, on
an unfamiliar channel but just as cheerful and welcoming as ever, were my old
friends – monster, chimp and human. I could count (literally) on the corny
rhymes, the broad puns and the wholesome songs. I could revel in the fact that
everyone who arrived on the street was always part of the neighborhood.
There are many, many vignettes from the old shows that have
stuck with me and many of them are now my canonical language. When in the
operating room I would count spinal levels ala the Count (“One spinal level,
two spinal levels, hah ha ha!”) every nurse who was a mother would chuckle
along with me. I could joke about “people in the neighborhood” or sing a song
that was “simple to last the whole day long” and people would laugh or sing
with me.
One of my favorite moments, buried deep in my early watching
days, would feature on days when the show was brought to us by the letter X. I
would wait in eager anticipation for the furry green sleuth Sherlock Hemlock,
deerstalker on head and magnifying glass in hand, to make his dramatic
appearance. “Egads!” he would sing with only somewhat comic seriousness. “X
marks the spot/ X means there’s danger” and so forth.
I knew my alphabet well before I watched Sesame Street. But I'm not sure I loved it quite so dearly.
When is too long not long enough?
On this Island of artificial time and enforced separation, we
have suffered through almost a year of stricture. We have masked and stood our
ground, waiting patiently for the scientific miracle that finally arrived, Then,
with less patience but more resolve, we have waited for the inevitable farce of
rolling that miracle out.
The ordeal has seemed forever, this year of solitude,
fraught with loss and sacrifice on everyone’s part. Finally, with the turn of
the new calendar page, we have started to see some glimmer of relief, the
faintest outline in the fog of a causeway that will lead us off the Island.
Will lead us home.
Now is not the time to lose patience or resolve. Now is not
the time to ignore the discipline that gave us this mere suggestion of relief.
Now is not the time to abandon the measures that are leading us forward.
But that is exactly what our so-called leaders are doing.
Texas and Mississippi are scaling back any emergency declaration, declaring
their states 100% open, well before anything of substance has changed. To think
that the global crisis can be beaten by sheer force of will, that we may “fake
the end of the pandemic until you make the end of the pandemic,” is both dangerous
and delusional.
No, I won’t be leaving my Island for the moment. It has seemed
like forever, but the only real forever, oblivion, lies ahead for those who
ignore the scientific truth. Too long, too soon. I’ll choose patience and hope
and what I know is the safer course.
In my youth, my family loved bookstores. No outing was complete without an hour or more browsing through the luxuriant shelves. We would fan out to our perspective pleasures: David would head to the Fantasy section or the Classics, Allison would beeline to SciFi, my mother would peruse the bestsellers and pick out five or six titles that would serve both her and my father. All of them were avid and omnivorous readers. For me, it was sampling, unsure of my reading destiny.
My father, by and large, would stand in the front of the
store, benignly smoking his pipe (it was a different time) and content in the
happiness of his brood and the knowledge that my mother would provide him well
with reading material.
On rare occasions though, my dad would walk into the store,
perhaps moved by my aimlessness, take a volume off the shelves and hand it to
me with a definitive, “Read this!” Which I always did, grateful for the
guidance and the personal contact.
One book that he gave me was a poem called “archy and
mehitabel” by Don Marquis. Now largely
overlooked, it relates the musings of a cockroach named Archy who lives at a
newspaper office and communicates with Marquis through typewritten notes.
Because the roach hits the keys by jumping on them one at a time, he cannot
capitalize and rarely wastes his time and energy on punctuation. The whole poem
cycle is a flow of free verse and association that talks in a hard-bitten and
world-weary voice about life and death and disappointment.
Archy’s cynicism is balanced by the other title character,
Mehitabel, a cat who claims to be reincarnated from Cleopatra. She recalls
glorious and pampered times in palaces surrounded by servants and feasts while
all the while recounting her dingy and sordid current existence surviving in
alleys and garbage cans. Tragic as she is, she is never beaten down. She is
imbued with hard worn wisdom and fatalism. Life is difficult, bleak and chancy,
but it is life and there will always be opportunities to live.
Mehitabel’s favorite interjection is “wottheehell” which
rings like a refrain through her wonderful songs. This remarkable neologism
captures a sense of both disbelieve and of perseverance. It reflects the shock
that bad things happen (What is going on here?). But it also contains a cosmic
shrug (Who cares if they happen?). It is both vulnerable and defiant.
By the time I graduated college, I had read “archy and
mehitabel” dozens of times (much like father had in his youth) and then set it
aside. I have only recently discovered it afresh, during a time of turmoil and
uncertainty. I find it comforting both as an old friend and a new source of
inspiration.
Not quite as cynical as Archy, I do not have the brashness
of Mehitabel, able to toss away privation with the arrogance that I have earned
and deserve better things. But wouldn’t it be nice to have that kind of courage
and the certainty to shrug and dance, lilting in time with your own sense of
assurance and immortality. “there’s a dance in the old dame yet” says Mehitabel
the cat “so wotthehell wotthehell”
VERSE ON A FUTURE MORNING
Hope lies
Just beyond a windowpane
Beyond a moment
beyond a whisper or a
breath
Hope waits
Bare-faced and welcome
Beyond a needle
beyond a touch or an
embrace
Hope sits
At open tables
In beery suds
in uncorked bottles and shared
glasses
Hope bides
With eager patience
In watchful dreaming
in expectation and
memory
Do you see her still?
Many, many months ago, when I was writing these notes daily, I turned to the old trick of alphabetical subject matters. I got as far a T before losing my taste for it. The intervening gap is serendipitous because it allows me to pick up where I left off with a timely and fascinating word that seems to be on everybody’s lips right now – Unity.
It is true that everyone, particularly lawmakers, is
bandying the word about like an Apple Jack jug at a fish fry. To quote Inigo
Montoya in The Princess Bride, however, “I do not think that word means what
you think it means.”
For most people, Unity is more apparent in the absence than
in the presence. It is easy to tell when two sides are at opposite ends of a
spectrum and are stubbornly refusing to accept the validity of the other’s ideas.
We recognize when there is a failure of accord, largely because everyone is so
quick to point fingers at the other side and define the chasm between them. But
too many assume that Discord is the opposite of Unity.
Cries of condemnation follow anybody exerting their
democratically earned authority, saying that to move forward on one agenda against
the will of the minority is fomenting anger and division. It is convenient that
the most strident cries for Unity come from that very minority.
Disagreement is not mutually exclusive of Unity, because the
latter does not mean to march in lockstep. There is no single idea on which
everyone agrees. To find such a cause or ideal is beyond the scope or even the
desires of a healthy society. We all need our own beliefs because all our needs
are unique.
Unity is not agreement of thought but of direction. We don’t
need to agree that we should eat only pizza, just that we should do something
to slake our hunger. We do not need to agree that everyone should be given
healthcare coverage by the government, just that everyone should have access to
medical care. We do not have to agree with a specific legislation, just that
the need for action is vital.
Unity is not capitulation, nor is it really compromise. It
is the ability to define a common goal and the will to work to achieve it
through some means that is somehow acceptable to the greatest number of people.
Unity is negotiation and cooperation. It is give-and-take.
Most important, Unity is a situation where everybody at the
table has a voice that is respected and considered. By extension, Unity means
that everyone at the table must in turn respect and consider all other voices.
