March Madness
This is Basketball Month!
It is also National Peanut Month, National Nutrition Month, National Women’s History Month, and American Red Cross Month. The flower of the month is the daffodil; aquamarine is the gem. In Minnesota, March has the dubious “honor” of being The Snowiest Month.
Some days we receive four seed catalogues. Does Park Seed hire poets? Consider: Apricot Delight, Saucy Seduction, Angel’s Breath, Hello Yellow, Polarstar, Miss Manners, Raspberry Splash, and Summer Daze as flower names. My husband’s eyes glaze as he reads. He makes lists, stares at the yard, and daydreams. Our rhubarb is up, and the poet daffodils beg to bloom.
Perhaps basketball coaches hire poets. There’s Sweet Sixteen, the Cinderella Story, Elite Eight, and Final Four (complete with alliterations!) As of this writing, Kentucky remains undefeated.
Poets wallow in the extremes of March, wind, rain, spring green (my favorite color today), and the promise of rhododendrons, lilacs, crocus, tulips and daffodils. I smell them now.
Poets have no problem answering Mary Oliver’s question, “How to love this world?” We follow her advice: pay attention, be astonished, tell it. Anne Lamott agrees with Mary. Anne writes, “This is how we are supposed to be in this world: present and in awe.” Poet, Jane Hirshfield, is in the same boat: “As elsewhere in life, attentiveness only deepens what it regards.” Imagine Mary, Anne, and Jane in a boat together!
May Sarton adds, “…if one looks long enough at almost anything, looks with absolute attention at a flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, grass, snow, a cloud, something like revelation takes place. Something is given and perhaps that something is always a reality outside the self.”
Following are March poems. Wendell is back, accompanied by Emily. I can’t let Emily alone, or she won’t let me alone! She tugs my hand and in a breathy voice whispers, “Me. Choose me.” I take her down from my bookcase. (What would happen if I didn’t?)
I found a beautiful haiku by a Japanese poet new to me, Nakamura Tei-jo, and Robert Louis Stevenson wanted to be heard. Elizabeth Bishop is know for her poem, “A Cold Spring.” I didn’t have room to include it, but it deserves to be read in its entirety.
Spring poems abound. Wind, rain, daffodils and clouds deserve attention. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. (or Mary will come after you with her dogs.)
March-Mad
May Sarton
The strangely radiant skies have come
To lift us out of winter’s gloom,
A paler more transparent blue,
A softer gold light on fresh snow.
It is a naked time that bares
Our slightly worn-down hopes and cares,
And sets us listening for frogs,
And sends us to seed catalogues
To bury our starved eyes and noses
In an extravagance of roses,
And order madly at this season
When we have had enough of reason.
Wendell Berry
Through the weeks of deep snow
we walked above the ground
on fallen sky, as though we did
not come of root and leaf, as though
we had only air and weather
for our difficult home.
But now
as March warms, and the rivulets
run like birdsong on the slopes,
and the branches of light sing in the hills,
slowly we return to earth.
Emily Dickinson
A Light exists in Spring
Not present in the Year
At any other period –
When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad
on Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.
It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows upon the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.
Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay –
A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.
Nakamura Tei-jo
Born in 1900 in Kumamoto, Nakamura Tei-jo promoted women’s haiku writing through mass media.
Come out!
You can almost touch
the spring moon
The Wind
Robert Louis Stevenson
I saw you toss the kites on high
And blow the birds about the sky;
And all around I heard you pass,
Like ladies’ skirts across the grass –
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!
I saw the different things you did,
But always you yourself you hid.
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all —
Oh wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!
O you that are so strong and cold,
O blower, are you young or old?
Are you a beast of field and tree,
Or just a stronger child than me?
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!