Cherry Blossom by Abby Murray
Cherry Blossoms by Toi Derricotte
Blue-Butterfly Day by Robert Frost
Prayer Beginning with a Line by Czaykowski by Pablo Piñero Stillmann
A Prayer by Bogdan Czaykowski
Calamity Again by Taras Shevchenko
2 poems from "Evening Land" by Par Lagerkvist
A Short Story of Falling by Alice Oswald
Confessional by Jonathan Everitt
Time... such a familiar trope in poetry, is rare seen as anthropomorphized as a "giver of affection"! How delightful, that with contemplations on Cherry Blossom, and the usual Spring musings on impermanence time is "conspiring to send love notes"! One perfect cherry blossom as gift... and time begging the speaker to love it day after day... Note, I am paraphrasing the first poem... and the delicious and unusual handling of time. Usually a "blip of a life" is cause for regret-- but here, time, much as we cannot control it or circumstances, gives its affection, asks to be noticed and used as wanted, with a sense of unhurried happiness! All of this with a beautiful sound pattern of short vowels (the "i" in gift, brittle, whistle, pick, it, blip, notice) the longer I in time, likes and longer stress words which render vowels into neutral schwa. (begging, wanting, flaunting). Certainly the sounds reinforce the ideas, and acts as if a paint for the unconscious to be used freely.
Cherry blossom, as symbol of ephemeral and harkening to the Japanese warrior whose highest honor is to die in battle, in the next poem gives way to the cherry tree as setting for gatherings of people. An interesting note, from Mike at Rundel, that cherry trees have been developed either to focus on the fruit or the blossom for viewing. https://libanswers.nybg.org/faq/271056
I love serendipity! Because I had paired the two poems side by side, the Derricotte looked to be a quatrain of the first four lines, followed by a repeated couplet in italics! We puzzled about the couplets! One idea was that the blossoms of the tree are whispering "be patient" -- and all those viewers and people in the park responded to the trees, "you have an ancient beauty". Other ideas -- the poet is telling the reader to be patient, that we are all one as beautiful as the gnarled old cherry trees. Or perhaps it is indeed the blossoms giving a reassuring message to the poet, worried about her poems not being as beautiful. Regardless, we remarked how when people gather and take pictures of themselves together, the smiles for the camera reflect a genuine happiness. It is not warm... there is a fur-trimmed coat...but such a beautiful mingling because of these trees-- as if they too are enjoying the love caught in friendship.
I explained the hyphenated blue-butterfly day, as one of those first warm days with a cloudless sky and seeing the first butterflies... Indeed... sky-flakes (perhaps cherry blossoms along with the butterflies) and the lovely mix of songbird implied in "flowers that fly". We spoke of desire, that fundamental procreative power in Spring, the nuanced alternate rhyme. As David remarked, Frost, no matter how beautiful or joyful the description, adds a lace of melancholy... here, the "April mire".
This of course gave rise to many references to mud and mud season... Gilbert and Sullivan Mikado, the ""Mud, mud, I love mud" song, and I believe a even a reference to Kevin Gates, "Out of the Mud" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-QZzVytupY.
The next pairing of "Prayer" perhaps illustrates Billy Collins' advice for a good poem: starts with clarity and ends with mystery. For sure, the title announced clearly, a prayer. But who is asking to be thrown into a cloud, and is there something we should understand beyond a slant reference to Noah and a God who does not keep promises? (Does God do better after the flood?) It would feel that Stillmann's speaker is desperate and suspects, since he asks this God to be honest enough to laugh at him falling again, that making rain fall harder to remind of our unreliability, (is our confined to just humans, life on earth?) that perhaps God is also unreliable. The "awkward" hand, rhyming with "aught yet are" make me think of a circular continuity of nothing. There are no "ands", only delicately-coiled ampersands that join the "slip & fall & slip and & once/again fall & laugh again.
O lord! We felt the speaker, with a fate rivaling that of Job, was at a church gathering, standing up to deliver an extemporaneous speech, the repeated punctuation of "O lord" a way to pause, gather his thoughts. The first prayer makes more sense than the second.
Here the imprecation is to "throw me into a cloud" -- and other various places (flower, lake, forest, into the shape of a stone) but with specific requests of what not to turn the one implorer into (bee, fish) or with specific conditions (not to be found like a pinecone by a squirrel; not to be thrown onto a London street and what is going on with biting walls in that city? The ending reminds me of the Salamander symbol adopted by François premier of France:
"In medieval iconography it represented the man who never lost the peace of his soul (went through the fires of passion) and who was confident in God despite all troubles. So it corresponded to chastity, virginity, loyalty. It was also identified with Christ who would baptize the world with fire flames. The salamander was a powerful symbol because it was associated with both fire and poison and many people were afraid of it. At the time it was believed that salamanders could use any type of fire without harm. Even brilliant minds like Leonardo da Vinci believed this because he wrote about the salamander: “This has no digestive organs, and gets no food but from the fire, in which it constantly renews its scaly skin. The salamander, which renews its scaly skin in the fire,—for virtue"
This brings us to Calamity Again. This seemed a timely poem with the war in Ukraine.
We commented on the outrage of the exclamation point -- 5th line -- that confirms the announcement on the first line repeating the title-- Calamity again!
When suddenly...!
Short and to the point.
and two poems by Par Lagerkvist... Although translated by Auden and another, the language felt a bit clumsy. We had a sense of a choice of gratitude in face of loss, or facing the unknown --
Hard to understand the twist at the end of "homeless". Like the second poem, there is a sense of conviction about peace, although hard to believe when making the best of a bad situation. Certainly
happiness is a highly subjective element dependent on attitude. As Richard mentioned, when all is said and done, what will anyone remember? Is the wishing to look back of the guest referring to death,
leaving earth, and afterlife, or perhaps a dream of death... that reminder to be mindful of what is,
and the nature of looking forward that goes along with it.
Kathy filled us in on Alice Oswald and her work. She is definitely a performer and so her poems never "sound" the same way twice. We all found the poem A Short Story of Falling an incantatory experience.
Her comparison of her poems as "found carvings", balances the evident form you see in this poem--
the form more a a guide post, the couplets giving room for pauses.
Judith was reminded of the myth of Typhonus
Richard kindly offered The Waters of March...by Antonio Carlos Jobim
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBEesrdaRog
It is a song about the arrival (promise) of Spring in Brazil, preceded by the floods of March
He also mentioned GOLD...lyrics by Nan Knighton saying “Whenever I hear this song on my player (sung by Linda Eder), I freeze and must listen to it all.It might bring out some discussion.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE0yiKoR0zk
He also mentioned To a lesser extent there is "If I Had My Way"...lyrics by Jack Murphy
https://genius.com/Linda-eder-if-i-had-my-way-lyrics
Finally, we arrive at Confessional by local poet Jonathan Everitt.
Skill use, of noun transformed to verb, hinging on the word "return" only to
review in reverse what is already said. Much more could be said about this love poem which intimates
at the complexity of relationship between two people.
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