Whilst it’s been another tricky year to navigate and an increasingly tricky world to parse, I do know this one thing. Your joy often arrives from the small places that are closest, in ways that are usually unpredictable, and never neatly packaged or labelled as such. If you stop to look.
Young or old, we’re all entropy engines, but parenthood is a particular type of assault on any sense of order. You buy the ticket, you take the ride, and sometimes it takes unexpected turns. Among the panoply of often terrible parenting advice handed down to us when we were absolute beginners, the best I ever had was from a friend whose children were pretty much grown, and who admitted to knowing nothing more of it than to steadily put one foot in front of the other, such that before you knew it you were out of the rough. As it turns out that is advice to keep with you for life.
Look up. In this hemisphere we spin to face the sun for longer each day. The other day, whilst out running in the neighbourhood, I came across the first cherry blossom of the year, a purple hued ornamental with five, maybe six, tūī hopping from flower to flower, stopping here and there to sing. It’s not here quite yet but the sun reaches a little higher each day. So I’ll leave behind these two poems on Spring, from two favourite American poets, both of whom deftly capture the upswell that makes us human.
Sorrow Is Not My Name
By Ross Gay
—after Gwendolyn Brooks
No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.
—for Walter Aikens
Ross Gay, "Sorrow Is Not My Name" from Bringing the Shovel Down.
Instructions on Not Giving Up
By Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.From The Carrying by Ada Limón
Hey Alex, I mihi to the 'meanwhile'... you speak of. I can feel the weight and complexity of it all, at the same time as you are reaching for simplicity and beauty. I read this piece this morning and it felt like your poems were in conversation with the same ideas. https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/07/23/platero-and-i/?mc_cid=94866cc723&mc_eid=b43dac0bce I love the photography too - more and more, wanting to find a way to capture all of it.... please keep your writing coming, I really really enjoy your words and style.