Tag: poetry

POETRY MEETS HISTORY

Move On Up a Little Higher. Charles White. African American Museum

On occasion, do you discover a book you didn’t know you owned?  Last week, I opened an ignored desk drawer to find five, small, unread books published in an American Poetry Project, 2003.  One was Poets of World War II, a collection containing poems, several whose poets I knew, but hadn’t associated them as poets of war.  The book contains poems inspired by several aspects of war, many conscience-rending accounts. 

Within its pages, I found some poems I had taught when I was teaching high school English, such as The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell.  I put this poem in the hands of seventeen-year-olds who might within a few years find themselves in the military, their lives precariously flying among the clouds.  It occurs to me now, what an assertive lesson by including a poem that concludes, “in the end they washed my body out of the turret with a hose.” Poetry is a powerful voice, one that inspires patriotism, comforts despair, incites romance.  Surely all rhetoric could and will accomplish these outcomes.  Yet poetry, for its condensed form, its rhythms aligning to meters akin to heartbeats, grabs us and stays with us for our entire lives.  Perhaps you recite nursery rhymes today, poems you haven’t read for decades.  Yet the verses elicit within you deep connections to people and places. That truth reminds me of the power, the usefulness, the responsibility of poets and their poems

I grew up in Virginia and then Massachusetts where history, particularly colonial history, dominated the curriculum. Students were expected to memorize poems arising from those histories.  One was Paul Revere’s Ride, by William Wadsworth Longfellow.  The poem gallops along between stanzas just as Paul Revere galloped between Boston and Concord, warning: “ The British are coming.”  Revere’s ride alerted colonists who rose up in time to defend their land, so the poem ends in triumph.  What could make us more patriotic?  We associate with winners, yet the Revolutionary War continued for years of death and destruction.  Somehow the bitter gall of war was not fed to school children.  Instead, we fed on heroism and military pride.  Only later, in the Civil War poems of Walt Whitman, did teachers expose battlefield suffering. Yet the Whitman poems we recited were Captain My Captain, mourning the death of Lincoln and likewise When Lilacs Last in the Courtyard Bloom.  Those elegies were nationalistic in bringing together a shared loss for most Americans

Poetry is still politically powerful.  John F. Kennedy was the first inaugurated president who invited a poet to read at his inauguration.  He chose Robert Frost.  Since then, there has been an invited poet at almost every inauguration that I can recall.  It is a custom, more than a tradition, and Donald Trump did not invite a poet to read.  Joe Biden did.  Amanda Gorman was the poet who read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021. At 22 years old, she became the youngest poet ever to perform at a presidential inauguration, where she recited her original poem, The Hill We Climb. As I recall, her poem and her delivery upstaged the entire ceremony.  The poem sold thousands of copies following her reading.  Her poem focused on themes of hope, healing, unity and resilience.  These themes can still be our history, themes that could inspire a history of which we would be proud.

Poems from World War II capsulized in often a few stanzas the reality of the time, teaching what might take chapters in a history text.  Every month, I put copies of a poem for the month in a wooden poetry box affixed to the fence surrounding my home. In selecting the monthly poem, I consider the time of year:  a winter poem could bring out Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.   For March, I planned to choose a spring poem, yet this month I was reading those World War II poems.  What called to me was a poem by Wilfred Bynner and first published in The New Republic, 1944, written about American soldiers returning to the Southern States after fighting and dying side by side on the European front. The soldiers are accompanying German prisoners of war:

                                    Defeat

On a train in Texas German prisoners eat
With white American soldiers, seat by seat,
While black American soldiers sit apart,
The white men eating meat, the black men heart.
Now, with that other war a century done,
Not the live North but the dead South has won,
Not yet a riven nation comes awake.
Whom are we fighting this time, for God's sake?
Mark well the token of the separate seat.
It is again ourselves whom we defeat.

American armed forces were not integrated until 1948.  In ten lines, a poem gives a lesson in history.  A poem teaching history evokes questions we ask today: “Whom are we fighting this time, for God’s sake?”

I am aware that the current administration discourages teaching about our nation’s responsibility for enslaving people and for the Jim Crowe segregation of citizens.  The president’s argument asserts that this history “makes young white children feel guilty.”  I was a young white child schooled in ignorance in the segregated South.  When I was twelve, my parents moved from Blacksburg, Virginia to Newton, Massachusetts.  I begged my parents to let me visit my Virginia friends over Christmas holiday.  Raising the $50 round-trip train ticket by hours of babysitting, I earned permission to ride coach from Boston to Christiansburg, Virginia.  When the train stopped in New York City, a Black man boarded and sat beside me.  Having been released from the hospital after a long illness, he was headed to family in South Carolina.  We visited pleasantly until we crossed into Washington, D.C.  Then Mr. Moses was gone, though I knew he had miles to go.  There were no more passengers of color in my car.  We had crossed the Mason Dixon line, and I had not been taught about its significance.  I could have used a history poem, for in all my studied poems of American history, not one taught me about Jim Crowe.  Did I feel guilty?  No, I felt curious.  I felt untaught. I wanted to know what happened and why I no longer had this traveling companion.   Without embracing ALL of our history, how could I grow up to work for a more just society?

Pine Trees or Politicians

Certain phrases stick with me like burrs to my clothing when walking through a grassy field.  No sense in trying to brush them off; besides, to do so I may discard something of value, that in the right surroundings could save my life.  This week’s sticky burr of a quotation comes from John Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth Sacred Soul,  in which he covers a chronology of Celtic Christianity with short biographies of theologians as far back as the 4th century who lived a Celtic spirituality. 

Perhaps the phrase stuck for its alliteration – easy to hear those “p’s” skipping from my lips as I juxtapose pines and politicians.  Nonetheless, White’s phrase stays with me.  I want to consider my relationship to Nature and Politicians.  How do I start my days?  I often turn on NPR for the morning news and commentary that is 99% depressing.  I hear voices of politicians in their most recent declarations of intention. Their words are consistent with whatever feeds their ambition.  There is no plot to follow.  I could skip listening to Morning Edition for a year, then return to it a year later to discover I had not missed a thing in the tenor of our time.  Rather like a bad soap opera.  For variety, I could switch to another newsfeed, perhaps not aligned to my feelings about the state of the world, not to mention the condition of our country.  But would any of these broadcasts enhance my life?  Would their negativity call me to action?  Would I come to a fuller understanding of my purpose on the planet?  Ironically, I am often listening to Morning Edition on my walks at dawn from my house down to and around the U of W campus, a six-mile morning walk under old established trees in old established neighborhoods: blossoming cherry trees in April, vermillion maples in autumn, tall proud pines and cedars all year long.

Now here comes Scottish poet, Kenneth White suggesting I might join him in listening to the trees rather than the politicians.  How do I listen to the trees? The cherry blossoms are speaking beauty and rebirth.  The autumnal maples and sweet gums recite their own poetry.  Poet Gerard Manly Hopkins evokes images of trees in fall and mourns the imminent death of summer “Margaret are you grieving “ over Goldengrove unleaving? … worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.” Then winter arrives and Robert Frost reminds us “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”  Surely the poets help me listen to the trees.  Yet even without the writers, if I block out cars and pedestrians passing by, and if I concentrate, I hear the trees.  Their leaves whisper in summer breezes.  Occasionally, such as this very dry summer, the trees crack and snap, discarding a branch that lands on the sidewalk. These are city images.  Now if I take myself to the woods, I remember recent books I read about trees, teaching that there is a conversation between alders and the firs, one fast growing and nutritious to the welfare of the other.  Is that alder speaking to the fir?  I guess it depends on how we define language.

And if we can listen to the trees, especially hearing their needs for water and space and clean air, can the trees hear us?  Although we don’t share the same language, we are all living things.  Life communicates.  When my husband and I began to restore a clear-cut lot we purchased after the owners sold the trees and evacuated their property, we decided on a variety of trees, some 20 -foot Douglas Firs purchased from neighbors across the road, and some small fruit trees for a space left vacant when the previous owners disposed of their cabin. One pear tree initially grew fast and tall, but its pears did not thrive.  Insect-infested and hard, the few pears on gnarled branches fell to the ground where deer consumed them before we had a chance.  Every time my husband and I walked by the pear tree, he said, “That tree looks bad.  It really has to go.”  So how would you feel if every time someone passed you, these were the descriptive words for you?  You would want to die, right?  And of course, the pear tree died.  Not wanting to accuse my husband of projecting a death wish on the tree, I nonetheless registered the lesson.  Years later, I desired a Katsura tree, for there are several in Seattle where I walk.  In autumn the pink leaves wave a fragrance I associate with the sweet smell of cotton candy.  From the moment we planted it, I have welcomed that Katsura tree almost every day.  I tell it how lovely and thriving it is, even though a workman backed his tractor into the trunk last year, leaving a two-foot scrape on the trunk.  “Good morning, Katsura.  I am so glad you are here.  Looking forward to your autumnal fragrance.”  It is now almost twenty-five feet, its leaves fluttering in the dappled sunlight, even though nearby cedars consume a great deal of available light.

On the way back to Seattle Monday morning, three gigantic logging trucks rolled on to the ferry ahead of us.  Their beds were piled with logs about five feet in diameter and perhaps fifty feet or more in length.  These were not the usual harvest of tree farms.  Rather they looked like the established trees from the National Olympic Forest.  I recall Donald Trump’s call for opening-up national forests to loggers.  I can imagine what birds and animals would say in response. But what about the trees?  Is any politician listening to the pines?

WITHOUT

Walking in January, I praise what is absent.  Usually lined with sweet gum trees — a canopy of broad green leaves in summer, large golden leaves in autumn–in January not a stubborn leaf remains on a tree.   It is as if this part of Capitol Hill did a thorough house cleaning, stripping each tree, but for the brownish gray branches.  They reach outwards and upwards, a tangle of geometric limbs, reminding me of Nature’s architecture.  Each limb seems to have purpose as a balance for another on the other side, or an extension from which thinner branches reach out like tendrils to the sun.  Rather than admire a shower of leaves, I note the rounded burls up the trunk, like moss-covered hats.  Thick moss paints itself between heavy limbs that decided to make their own way from a massive trunk.  On this twenty-seven-degree day, surely insects must snuggle in the soft moss.  Grateful for the absence of leaves, I see high in some trees, baskets of crazily assembled twigs and grasses.  Perhaps they are nests for squirrels cleverly camouflaged in other seasons, but out there now vulnerable to winter’s wind.

In the absence of abundance, I look for things to note, as if I were in a museum where the major exhibition is closed, and so I take time to view a few treasures I had ignored on other visits.  Last week, a wooded walk on Hood Canal revealed a giant stuffed bear attached to a tree. This morning, it is the angle of the sun on my neighbor’s door.  Although the solstice has passed, and each day may be a bit longer, it is as if the sun barely creeps over the horizon, casting long shadows even at 11:00 AM.  Today the light captured my neighbor’s front door where a Christmas wreath still hangs, a deep black-green circle with a velvet red bow.  Shadows from surrounding leafless trees dance around the wreath.

Granted this is a sunny day, uncommon in the Pacific Northwest winter, so sun and shadows grab my attention.  But rain or shine, there is interesting stuff dropped on parking strips and sidewalks.  A gigantic pine tree on the corner drops pinecones as large as ten inches long and three inches wide.  They lie atop a bed of thin dry needles.  Surely they would be a treasure if I imagined a creative use for them.  A friend celebrated Christmas by gathering large cones and stuffing them with suet and peanut butter, then hanging the cones around a park adjacent to her home.  She said her project was her gift to the many birds that winter-over in the woods. 

Walking through Volunteer Park, I note park benches and picnic tables without people enjoying them.  In summer they would be full.  There is something poignant about an empty park bench.  Is it waiting to be occupied?  Does it hold a memory of a couple resting there in June, holding hands, planning their future together?  And the playground, too cold for children today.  Iron poles chill a child’s hands.  I recall those warnings we shared in childhood about not putting your tongue on a frozen iron pole, then daring a kid to do it, but fearing consequences if the child accepts the dare.  The playground also remains in Waiting mode. 

Perhaps it is waiting that defines January.  There is no definitive Christmas on the horizon.  Even spring is far off, so waiting becomes waiting for what?  Yesterday my mailbox had three seed catalogs, each with a colorful cover of abundance:  golden carrots, blushing tomatoes, leafy lettuce.  If I fill out the order sheet, will my garden be ready any sooner? In my backyard,  I walk past raised beds where today skeletons of  tomato and pepper plants droop, bowing in submission to the freeze.  There too, a kind of beauty in the plants without fruit.  

At noon, I took a walk with my grandson to have a good, long visit before he returns to New York after his semester break.  As we walked along Prospect Street, an historic avenue of old Seattle wealth and mature maples, I shared with him my attraction to leafless trees. “Sure, Nana,” he agreed.  I have a leafless tree outside my New York apartment.  I love it in November when the last leaves drop.  Inside, I have more light.”  That’s it!  In a month when daylight only lasts seven or eight hours at best, we can feel as if we are deprived.  Yet a tree’s bare branches let the light shine through.

Clear-Cut











                                                  
Think of it as a field of corn
seeded in May, spaced equidistant
one kernel three feet from another
then submitted to the summer sun
and rain from spring to fall.
In forty years the harvest comes.
Each tree is of equal height --
nothing random here,
nothing wild with memory of
old growth girth that took a team of men
each one gripping a handle of a crosscut saw,
sweat making their wide suspenders
rub their flesh ripe and raw with wear.
Now, even you could wrap your 20th century arms
around the perimeter of a Douglas Fir.
Don’t bother counting rings of logs
exposed and waiting to be trucked away
to wonder what the tree had seen
decades before you were born.

Don’t listen for what raven calls from
a wind-snapped snag, nor listen for its throaty caw
ricocheting from cedar to alder above  
the density of ferns and salal,
a green grip of undergrowth even bears
lumber to cross toward rivers
shimmering with salmon the raven sampled
on its way, sweeping to the highest limb.
Don’t wonder about deer, fox or ermine
no longer there, but where they might have gone.

It’s not the forest that once was there before your birth
before the earth was just another garden 
for acres of trees the same year sown.
Did you miss something?  Why mourn 
like Miniver Cheevy child of scorn
born too late, knowing the party ended
before his time, before an invitation to a wilder world.
Find comfort in your poetic wandering
with the Hollow Men lamenting
as they stumble through jagged stumps 
encircling heaps of slash smoldering
burning for days or weeks 
like sacrificial offerings to spring,
to this April, when the thrush and jays would,
in another year, return to nest, and yet
what makes its home within a field of corn?


     Mary Kollar
	Copyrighted, March 2021