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[3 poems from The ECOPOETRY Anthology]
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from Song of Myself
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6
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
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I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
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Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
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Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
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Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
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And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.
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This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
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O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
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I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
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What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
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They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
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All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
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Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
collected in The Ecopoetry Anthology, Ann Fisher-Wirth & Laura-Gray Street (Trinity University Press, San Antonio, Texas, © 2020)
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They are alive and well somewhere . . . there is really no death
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June 21 is cold and rainy. Perhaps that is why the slug feels confident to patrol the deck rail fully exposed. They (one slug being both male and female) retract their delicate ommatophora when we approach, perhaps because we are large and our movement is easily sensed. After a minute they once again extend those beautiful slender eyestalks, perhaps because we are large and easily overlooked. In a moment their glide and wander will discover a dense patch of algae shaded by a finial. Their many-toothed radula will work hard and satisfy.
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Amelia and I watch until the rain drives us indoors. In a quarter hour it lessens and we return, but the slug has motored out of sight. Who knew it was so speedy? We peer under and around – no slug. She desires more slugs, so we hunt each post and rail of the deck, the green-hazed porch screens, the planters. We reach the far corner and look down into the mud and mangled trunks and branches left by this spring’s severe storm. Amelia asks why there is a layer of straw strewn across a patch of ground there.
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Seeing the forecast for a week of rain, on Monday morning I had finally taken up my fire rake and attacked the old sandbox site. When April’s tornado uprooted a big maple and white oak next to it (along with a dozen other trees behind our house), it exposed the bones of half-eaten 6×6’s I’d used to build the sandbox for Josh and Margaret in 1983. I dug them up and hacked out chickweed, smartweed, much despised stiltgrass. What had once been white sand was now filled with worms and 40 years of accumulating humus. Delicious.
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June 19-24 was Naturalist Challenge Week, sponsored by Great Smoky Mountain Institute at Tremont. Participate from anywhere on earth; earn points and you can win a prize – 10 points for planting pollinators. I mixed all my leftover native seeds from last fall: a tablespoon of Bluecurl my son-in-law Josh collected for me, four kinds of milkweed, some monarda and coreopsis and who knows what. I sowed them across 200 square feet now newly introduced to sunlight. I sprinkled with straw as Amelia noticed. And around the edges I planted pumpkin seeds preserved from soup last Christmas, seeds Josh begged from his 100 year-old grandmother, perpetually propagated.
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Yes, it’s late in the season for planting. Then again, who knows if we’ll even have frost this winter? Foothills NC, the new tropics. Every week Amelia and I can pause from our slug hunt, peer over the deck rail, and watch a patch of earth turning newly green. More life. I’ll save you a photo.
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November Cotton Flower
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Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,
Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,
And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,
Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,
Failed in its function as the autumn rake;
Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take
All water from the streams; dead birds were found
In wells a hundred feet below the ground—
Such was the season when the flower bloomed.
Old folks were startled, and it soon assumed
Significance. Superstition saw
Something it had never seen before:
Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,
Beauty so sudden for that time of year.
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Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
collected in The Ecopoetry Anthology, Ann Fisher-Wirth & Laura-Gray Street (Trinity University Press, San Antonio, Texas, © 2020)
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Today’s poems are from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, with a rousing introduction by Robert Hass (Trinity University Press, San Antonio, Texas, © 2020). It is a comprehensive volume, with over a hundred twentieth- and twenty-first century poets, and the book’s opening Historic section includes, among many others, the three poets in today’s selection:
Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass was first published in 1855 and by the second edition had doubled in length. Today’s small excerpt from Song of Myself highlights the manifold metaphor of the most common of green living things.
Jean Toomer – moved to the South in 1921 and was inspired to write Cane in 1923, a hybrid work intertwining narrative and poetry, then continued on to pursue a literary career. He became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
Wallace Stevens – the vice president of an insurance company, Stevens wrote poetry late into the night and on vacations. He also wrote treatises which suggested poetry’s ability to supplant religion; his Collected Poems in 1955 won the Pulitzer Prize.
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from Sunday Morning
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VI
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
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VII
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.
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Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
collected in The Ecopoetry Anthology, Ann Fisher-Wirth & Laura-Gray Street (Trinity University Press, San Antonio, Texas, © 2020)
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