Buoyant April

April is a happening month: Exodus, Easter, eager wildflowers, beginning baseball season and tax-time. However, we shouldn’t forget the most notable holiday: National Poetry Month.

T.S. Eliot proclaimed April as the cruelest month in his Wasteland poem. It was the month that began WWI which punctured the notion of progress, while reminding us of evanescent beauty, loss of faith and ultimate mortality.

A voice of gloom, he was. Not the guy I want to split a pizza with. My impulse is to celebrate life even with all its lethal folly.

Now more than ever we need an antidote to the violence of bulletins, bullets and bullshit. Poetry demands a different kind of reading than a newspaper. Words. well-chosen, can fill the page like impressionist brushstrokes. Even between the words there can be found a vitality to buoy us and open a shuttered heart or lift us like a resurrection. It is not a bus to paradise but transport to authenticity. A successful poem has a ring of truth and a music of its own.

One doesn’t need to write poetry to be a poet. It has to do with allowing that sensibility to find expression; to engage life metaphorically and find associations between this and that. It is less a way of saying than a way of being. One can live their poem.

I thought to take this occasion to offer some poems I wrote years ago which I recently came across.

Work

A warehouseman lifts a crate / and his arms are holding a child.

With a cleaver in his hand / the butcher watches a rose / bloom on his apron.

Under the hydraulic lift / seven colors arrange themselves / at the mechanic’s feet.

Hauling peat bog in Connemara light at eleven at night / iridescent dragonfly.

Moments, unsummoned, ease their way in / blood, oil and petals.

 ___________________________

Grandpa Harry

He was the kid wheeled by pushcart

from Warsaw to Hester Street.

hiding the rotten peaches on the bottom.

Winter meant gloves with holes

for his fingers to count on

and thaw over an ashcan cooking chestnuts.

He saw out of the sides of his eyes

for grabbing hands.

He could yell in four languages,

shut his ears to all of them

and to the hooves beating

their barouches and curses on the cobblestone.

                   

Crickets make him nervous

when they hesitate,

then start up again

rubbing their legs together         

bargaining for his life.     

Words and chestnuts were cheap, he said

seventy years later in our backyard.

He still can’t listen much

but remembers more than he ever heard.

He needs his noise-

it keeps his blood moving.