Here’s another indicator that civilization is headed
straight to hell in a handbasket: The
Guardian’s page of photos of the Beltane festivities held Sunday at
Glastonbury.
It’s not just that the photos look like they might have
been submitted by what the Brits refer to as Members of the Public. (They’re
colorful, but not especially well composed.) It’s that the captions are
mindless. “A woman holds up a bunch of flowers”; “A dance is performed”; and
(my favorite) “A man painted green and dressed in green”.
It’s like The
Guardian has turned over the amateur photos to a caption-bot. Or possibly outsourced the work to Minsk.
Just for ducks, I checked out the Telegraph, The Guardian’s
polar political opposite. Their picture
page is not materially better. My only take-away from them is that Beltane
is a pagan festival. Because they say so in eight of the 14 captions.
At some point during the development of the various
communities in the Valley They Call Silicon, someone must have got a terrific
deal on magnolias, because they’ve been planted all over the South Bay and the
Peninsula, in residential yards and along municipal parking strips.
I used to love encountering them on my walks; they never
failed to lift my spirits, whatever their stage of blooming. If you caught them
at just the right time, you could even step into their scent.
But let me say that, on a walk around my neighborhood last
week, I was struck as of old by the power of dogwood, which I prefer to the
vaunted cherry trees. When dogwood are in full bloom, they are just clouds of
beauty, white or pink.
And today I’m grateful that I am back amongst them.
Our
final poem for National Poetry Month is from Dylan Thomas. We last heard from him
three
years ago, so we're due.
We
should also visit this particular piece because I’ve dragged you through a lot
of death this month, for some reason. Between Irish history, World War I and
various terror activities, we’ve waded through a lot of blood. So let’s allow
Thomas to take us beyond that mortal threshold, when the clean bones are gone.
It’s a good way to see us out of this April.
“And
Death Shall Have No Dominion”
And
death shall have no dominion.
Dead
man naked they shall be one
With
the man in the wind and the west moon;
When
their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They
shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though
they go mad they shall be sane,
Though
they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Alright,
we’ve had some pretty grim poems throughout this month, so time to change it up.
How about something from Roald Dahl? That’s got to be a bit of a laugh.
Well,
now that I consider it—I suppose the laugh factor involved here rather depends
on whether you’re the farmer or the pig.
Whatever.
“The
Pig”
In
England once there lived a big
And
wonderfully clever pig.
To
everybody it was plain
That
Piggy had a massive brain.
He
worked out sums inside his head,
There
was no book he hadn't read.
He
knew what made an airplane fly,
He
knew how engines worked and why.
He
knew all this, but in the end
One
question drove him round the bend:
He
simply couldn't puzzle out
What
LIFE was really all about.
What
was the reason for his birth?
Why
was he placed upon this earth?
His
giant brain went round and round.
Alas,
no answer could be found.
Till
suddenly one wondrous night.
All
in a flash he saw the light.
He
jumped up like a ballet dancer
And
yelled, "By gum, I've got the answer!"
"They
want my bacon slice by slice
"To
sell at a tremendous price!
"They
want my tender juicy chops
"To
put in all the butcher's shops!
"They
want my pork to make a roast
"And
that's the part'll cost the most!
"They
want my sausages in strings!
"They
even want my chitterlings!
"The
butcher's shop! The carving knife!
"That
is the reason for my life!"
Such
thoughts as these are not designed
To
give a pig great piece of mind.
Next
morning, in comes Farmer Bland,
A
pail of pigswill in his hand,
And
piggy with a mighty roar,
Bashes
the farmer to the floor…
Now
comes the rather grizzly bit
So
let's not make too much of it,
Except
that you must understand
That
Piggy did eat Farmer Bland,
He
ate him up from head to toe,
Chewing
the pieces nice and slow.
It
took an hour to reach the feet,
Because
there was so much to eat,
And
when he finished, Pig, of course,
Felt
absolutely no remorse.
Slowly
he scratched his brainy head
And
with a little smile he said,
"I
had a fairly powerful hunch
"That
he might have me for his lunch.
"And
so, because I feared the worst,
"I
thought I'd better eat him first.
And
here is a delightful rendition, courtesy of Pam Ferris:
Let’s
return to Latin America for today’s addition to National Poetry Month. Like the
Chilean Pablo
Neruda, Octavio Paz was both a poet and a diplomat, in this case in the
service of Mexico. He also was a Nobelist, winning for literature in 1990.
I
love the moment captured in “Between Going and Staying”. It strikes me as
something you’d read in a quantum physics paper: that frozen moment of light,
matter and motion that the poet wraps in words. But not one extraneous word.
See for yourself:
“Between
Going and Staying”
Between going and staying the day
wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of
blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of
reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an
eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters.
Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.
In
the original:
“Entre irse y quedarse”
Entre irse y quedarse dude el dÃa,
enamorado de su transparencia.
It’s
the last Wednesday in National Poetry Month, so one final poem from World War
I.
Siegfried
Sassoon is one of the best-known of the war poets. His experiences
at the Western Front transformed him, moving from patriotic support to bitter,
public opposition. Like Wilfred
Owen, Sassoon used poetic language and structure to convey the kinds of
things that newspapers did not report: filth, vermin, rotting corpses; terror,
incompetence, futility.
In
response to writing what became a public anti-war statement, Sassoon was sent
to a military psychiatric hospital. If he’d not been part of the county-Cambridge-and-cricket
set, he might instead have been jailed for voicing such opinions. He enjoyed
quite a long and distinguished career as poet, novelist and editor following
the war, which is kind of an anomaly for many of his contemporaries, who were
not granted the reprieve of life or health.
He
wrote “Aftermath” in 1919, and it was published the following year.
“Aftermath”
Have
you forgotten yet?...
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same-and War’s a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.
Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz–
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench-
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’
Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads—those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.
A
recent Washington
Post story announced that many
states in the Northeast are about to experience a 17-year cicada awakening.
Cicadas, in case you’ve never experienced them, are members of the locust
family, and when they come (in either 13-year or 17-year cycles) you understand
why they were one of the plagues God visited upon Egypt as encouragement to let
the Children of Israel go.
It’s
not just the singing, although there’s something very apocalyptic about their aggregate
sound. It’s their omnipresence in numbers you cannot imagine. Especially
splattering on your windscreen.
(Note
to self: get new wiper blades and check that windscreen fluid is topped up.)
At
any rate, in honor of what we may be about to experience here in the Old
Dominion, let’s have some haiku about cicadas from the master, Basho.
I’ve been hanging my daily poems this month around my
office walls. One of my colleagues caught a few of them and wondered why I’ve
got such dreary poetry decorating the place. Well, first off—he overlooked
Shakespeare and Carroll. But I’ll concede the point that this year I’ve been
pulling in some difficult topics. And here’s another, this time from Israeli
poet Yehuda Amichai.
Amichai was born in Germany, but his family emigrated to
the (then British) Palestine Mandate territory when he was 11. Like some of my
other choices this month (Sidney,
Gurney,
Radnóti),
Amichai served in the military. First in the British army during World War II, then in
the Israeli army in various wars against the Arabs.
He took as subjects the everyday world he found around him,
which is one of the reasons I find “The Diameter of the Bomb” so gripping. The everyday
world around him was violent, and the way he measures out the impact of that
violence here, juxtaposing all the impersonal numbers and geometry against the dreadful
human cost, is poetry at its most powerful.
“The Diameter of the Bomb”
The
diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and
the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with
four dead and eleven wounded.
And
around these, in a larger circle
of
pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and
one graveyard. But the young woman
who
was buried in the city she came from,
at
a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges
the circle considerably,
and
the solitary man mourning her death
at
the distant shores of a country far across the sea
It’s been a number of years since I’ve been to a Seder—well
into the last century, now that I think of it. So I was very happy to be
invited to one held on Friday by friends
I’ve “met” in the past year.
(Thank you, Internet.)
A Seder, if you are at all unclear, is the meal that
commemorates the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. It’s a little like
Thanksgiving, because it is a giving
of thanks, and also because the food is inextricably woven into the Tradition.
Meaning: just as it can be a real Bone of Contention if your family has
cornbread stuffing at Thanksgiving and it turns out that your partner’s has
oyster stuffing, there may need to be UN-level negotiations as to whether you
have potato latkes or matzo latkes at your Passover Seder.
Thankfully, this was not an issue on Friday. There were
both potato and matzo latkes, as well as two kinds of charoset, multiple kugels
and every other holiday thing you could think of.
Depending on your family background, at Seder you can spend literally
hours reading the Haggadah,
with or without heated interpretive discussions; or you can do an extremely
abbreviated version, ask the Four Questions and get straight to the brisket. There
are certain elements common to every iteration, but you can take it from there.
As I said, it’s been a while since my last Seder, and mine
have always been, uh, unorthodox. (I’m thinking in particular about the one
with people from film school, where we watched the Passover portion of The Ten Commandments, and had the
youngest black, male Catholic ask the Four Questions.) There were two elements
of Friday’s that I don’t recall from the past: the Throwing of the Plagues, and
the Asking of the Questions in multiple languages.
What languages, you inquire? Well, English, Latin, Russian,
Yiddish, German, Dutch, French, Norwegian, Arabic, Spanish and Klingon.
It was a lovely family meal, with more than 20 people at
long tables stretched across two rooms. And I’m very grateful to have been part
of it.
As this is the actual hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising (24 April 1916), and as it is not possible to get through National Poetry Month without something from William Butler Yeats, let’s have the granddaddy of them all, “Easter 1916”. It’s the one that has, in its closing lines, come to define modern Ireland. Yeats was an Irish nationalist, but not a revolutionary. He decried the use of violence, until the Brits began summary executions. He was so appalled by the response that he was even willing to count John MacBride as a hero/martyr, naming him in the litany that also includes Pearse and Connolly. MacBride was the "drunken, vain-glorious lout" who married Maude Gonne, the woman Yeats loved hopelessly his whole life, thus twice-loathed by the poet. But in the face of the institutional barbarism of the British authorities, he was willing to give his rival some props. You can see Yeats trying to feel his way through his reaction to the rising—moving through chitchat at the club, speculating on what contributions the individual Fenians might have made and wondering if such a blood sacrifice was necessary, because "England may keep faith". In the end, though, what's done is done, and nothing will be the same.
