for Dec. 27

Father Time and Baby New Year by Michael Meyerhofer

 Solstice   by  John Roche

 The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

Winter Love by Linda Gregg

 [little tree] BY E. E. CUMMINGS

Winter Night  by Edna St. Vincent Millay

What We Need – David Budbill

Michael Meyerhofer provides us with delightful cleverness with juxtapositions of unusual vocabulary,

descriptions such as dripstone beard,  star-spangled diaper, confetti-fogged billboards 

as well as "hyperbolic metonymy" (bowels out of control).   Time's watch ticks along through evolutionary history where bones of sea cows and Babylonians add spice to the usual dinosaur... The poem begins with a conversational tone as if  a newscaster recounting a parade as Father time toddles off, and the toddler with a grin "like a pacifist" drools in... A brief tour of the world traditions... Dutch, Greek, Japanese, Scots and kissing Americans... And what will be different about the new year?

Not too much.  

David shared the Robert Frost letter to the "Amherst Student", where he responds to students wishing him a happy 60th birthday.

in 1934.  Not a great age... rather gives rise to think of the age of the world we live in... and how, we really have no way of knowing

that all ages are bad, and  would be worse if reassembling heaven where is might be equally hard to save your soul -- that is...

a sense of decency and integrity.

John Roche gives us a more gentle feel ending with a familiar strain of "silent night" in the poem Solstice. However, the beginning "One duck floats between heaven and earth"...  soon turns to fireseed -- duck-hunting... and the powered cheek, echoing the snow

turned tasty, sprinkled like sugar on the trees...   

The Thomas Hardy poem, written on New Year's Eve, 1899 paints a dread darkness ("darkling" meaning, "in the dark ) both

of winter, but of the times... "The tangled bine-stems scored the sky 

                                        Like strings of broken lyres, "

Some of the vocabulary is quite archaic... "blast beruffled"; "outlet" creating an antique mood.

Susan noted how some it felt like Jabberwocky... as if some of the words were made up... which brought up  

Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary...  and a discussion of how names of colors

of crayons have changed... how crimson and scarlet are not the same; burnt sienna is not rust called by any name... 

The next poem, "Winter Love" had a  tone of regret, and the question of whether the title served it came up.  How  would you decorate silence?  Instead of engaging the imagination, the 

The E.E. Cummings poem gives a lovely persona to Christmas trees... a sense of renewal... celebration of survival... and brought up several stories... 

TODAY is the  kind of day to read  Winter Night  by Edna St. Vincent Millay— indoors, by the fire.  The gift of trees, still giving to us after they are felled, so we gather by a fire they create, to talk, share stories—

 the 4 rhymes grouped in 3’s — the warmth and light inside, after the outside work

which makes it possible… the goodness of sharing peace, no matter  the howl of the wild bob cat… 

     You might wonder why the Budbill piece is a “poem” ... consider  the white spaces for kindness, peace, joy to hang on, the “little, small, brief" of the “poem, song, moment” — which float — like little boats,  in spite of "The Emperor, his bullies and henchmen”.That triumvirate is not given adjectives, is not contained in the space of human expression and being.  Back to the idea of “best word, best order — the arrangement and weaving of sound.