The Poet's Corner II - July 10, 2020

The Poet’s Corner – July 10, 2020

           with Eva Poole-Gilson

            I talked myself into my first full-time teaching job–at a junior high school in Rockford, Illinois. I did not have the usual how-to-teach courses required for an official credential, but it was mid-August, and school would start in a few weeks and they needed an English teacher.    

Young and arrogant, I guess I figured since both my parents had worked as teachers, the needed savvy was in my genes.

            Wow, was I in for a steep learning curve! and numerous rude awakenings.

            This was the 1960’s. I was the usual politically ignorant young white woman of the times. The school was about 50% Black, 50% White.

            Probably the only “savvy” that helped me quickly was a lamentable realization: my many University literature classes had introduced me to no famous Black writers. On my own, I’d come across Nikki Giovanni who was just then breaking into print and being noticed. Maybe a few other Black writers had made a short walk in my brain, but I’d never spent time with Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist and writer. I knew nothing about the famous Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance, or unbleached American history: Before the Mayflower?

            I dove! Had to find and grab lifesavers for myself and for my adolescent students so we could survive our captivity: no drowning! no classroom battleground! Peace not prejudice! Inklings of enlightenment…

            This may be when Langston Hughes became one of my favorite poets. He wrote the line that Lorraine Hansberry chose for the title of her famous play, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway.

***

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

 Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes

1902-1967

**

               Now I still invite Langston to inspire me and any students. I still like to open the first day of a five-day series of poetry-writing workshops with his 8-liner below. I suggest that the students can learn the poem by heart that day, or certainly by day five. And many of them do.

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

 Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

The Poet's Corner July 7, 2020

            “The value of the poetic spirit is that it helps us to think loftily. It enables us to remember that we have kinship not only with the dusty street but with the stars.” Walter Russell Bowie. From On Being Alive, published in 1932…so, yes, old…by “contemporary” standards.

            But by old-fashioned, more philosophical, historical “standards”?

            It rings loud and clear!

            Is it too sentimental? Who uses loftily in today’s world?

            I don’t know. I don’t really care. The quotation just rings loud and clear, and true.

            I’ve been spending these last four, Covid-closeted months with quite a few of my old-fashioned friends at The Imagination Lab. We didn’t wear masks! Wait! Don’t worry!

            Of course I’m talking BOOKS here. Books who communicate from the heart in silence: glorious, contagious silence.

            They keep encouraging me to stay close to all my other friends. “Are you sharing with them?” they ask me.

            So, Hi!

            July 7, 2020  Hello, from “The Poet’s Corner.”

            I couldn’t sleep in the wee small hours after the strangely curbed-in, crowd-forbidden Independence Day celebrations across the United States. I kept rolling around, cat to one side, heap of sheets and blankets to the other.

            It was stuffy inside my house without the swamp cooler, and it was cold with it. I rolled around. I thought of the July Fourths of my childhood. Each one of those usually started with me and my brothers crawling out the second-story window of our parents’ bedroom, onto the front-porch, shingled roof. It was rough on the bottom, but it allowed a balcony seat at the parade down the broad street in front of our house.

            My parents—well, my mother—usually made us crawl back in: the roof angled sharply down. She preferred we walk down: 15 stairs, across the living room, and out the front door to ground-level, front row center: our yard—instead of being dumped there during horse-play or Independence-Day glee.

            Parents. My mother. My father. We all have them.

            But mine couldn’t keep me company, comfort me, couldn’t call me back in, to safety. Instead, here’s the poem that kept me company in those restless, wee-small hours…

                        anyone lived in a pretty how town

                        (with up so floating many bells down)

                        spring summer autumn winter

                        he sang his didn’t he danced his did

                        Women and men (both little and small)

                        cared for anyone not at all

                        they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same

                        sun moon stars rain

                        children guessed(but only a few

                        and down they forgot as up they grew

                        autumn winter spring summer)

                        that none loved him more by more

                        when by now and tree by leaf

                        she laughed his joy she cried his grief

                        bird by snow and stir by still

                        anyone’s any was all to her

                        someones married their everyones

                        laughed their cryings and did their dance

                        (sleep wake hope and then) they

                        said their nevers they slept their dream

                        stars rain sun moon

                        (and only the snow can begin to explain                   

                        how children are apt to forget to remember

                        with up so floating many bells down)

                        one day anyone died I guess

                        (and no one stooped to kiss his face)

                        busy folk buried them side by side

                        little by little and was by was

                        all by all and deep by deep

                        and more by more they dream their sleep

                        no one and anyone earth by april

                        wish by spirit and if by yes.

                        Women and men(both dong and ding)

                        summer autumn winter spring

                        reaped their sowing and went their came

                        sun moon stars rain

                                                e e cummings

                                                1894-1962                  

Was it a spring storm?

Was it a spring storm? It must have been. Or summer? Yes, maybe even late summer…because there was fruit on the trees. Eighteen trees blew down, were blown over…and some were apple trees. She was maybe eight years old…when the big northeastern came down from Canada and wiped out just about all of her Gramma and Grampa’s front yard orchard. There were white birches, too, tangled into the fruit-laden branches, and limbs all a kilter in the front yard: big yard to her little eyes, a foresty jungle all tied up in what had been a quiet garden of sweet apples…trees not too tall that you couldn’t climb them. She’d been able to swing her feet up into a low fork or two and swing herself up into a small tree…a tree maybe her size, the tree young too.

    But suddenly a huge darkness in the sky came whooshing down: some winged enormous beast of a creature made of angry air…and then the weeks—summer? fall?—came of handsome young men with saws and muscles and sweaty arms and chests…on cleanup, digging out what was dirt, uncovering the grassy open parts that had been borders to flower beds. Branches torn and twisted and down, arms and torsos on her tree friends torn down, off, thrown into a foresty jungle.

    She got sort of used to it. It took long enough to be “cleaned up” that she got sort of used to playing in it…the aftermath. She was fascinated by the remnants of the devastating storm. She watched the young men, the clean-up crew. She doesn’t remember her Gramma and Grandpa in the overturned foresty—what once was orchard—garden. She doesn’t remember them, the adults—not her parents either—doesn’t and didn’t have any idea of how they felt when they stood deep in the limbs of their plant children… How heart-sad they must have been…but she was too young to have even a glimmer of real sadness for them.

    For her, so green and young herself, at first it was a magical—temporarily magical—new world. The scents of ripe apples, green leaves, sawdust fresh from young deciduous trees too, like men cut down in their prime. Youth and Death, and she played in it…fascinated by the young men...the nineteen-year-olds?...who survived the war of the storm? and came in brave and strong to mop and shore up the remains, to cut up and carry off the bodies of the fallen, to leave, after much work, an open field to be seeded or sodded, to put a soft kind of cover onto the battleground of the slaughter, of the tragedy.

    So many decades later…old enough now to be the gramma…she abhors seeing them cut down even so-called dead branches of any single tree.

First, I came to house-sit.

I had no idea what was in store for me. I was an innocent: a lonely writer who’d been living in San Francisco for five years, a city dweller who’d been so dulled by cement and buses and noises that she’d misplaced the belief in breath-taking, natural beauty.

I gingerly meandered down Yosemite’s Tioga Pass in a sun-roofed ’63 VW bug. It was the first of June 1975; it was one long dramatic gulp. Ice and snow were melting into slender, bending mirrors. Everything was silver and white and sky-blue and high and deep. I edged along in second gear, but my heart was in fourth. I felt like a golden eagle who’d suddenly burst the door of a metropolitan cage and rocketed to 15,000 feet. Space welcomed my wings.

Water lapped high in Mono Lake that year and reflected the dome of the world. Surely, I thought, there is no more exquisite place on Earth.

But when I turned south onto Highway 395, the sun began to set. The expanses of land rolled away from me in my little car; they stretched and then curled up into great peaks on both sides. The Sierra stood gold and shiny copper to the west; in the east the Whites held their shoulders straight under the thick, downing mauve of an early summer dusk. Every mile dropped me deeper and deeper into color and desert warmth and ever-increasing beauty.

Thank-you note to San Francisco,
Written on bended knee in the desert
Perhaps it is cowardly being here
Perhaps I should have stayed on the subway
or the buses of wear and tear and fear
I could still be lunching off plastic tray
at Fireman’s Fund—in temporary days
of insured claims, filed and lost, filed and lost
I could have learned to be desk-ridden, mossed
in the brain and heart, moldy in the mind—
metropolitan! But I chose instead
to run where the rapeless mountains stand lined
like massive love prayers waiting to be said
By my cowardice and will I’ve been led
to a land of columbine and aspen
to a dream where God will be and has been

So began my intense love affair with Inyo County….