A friend who is creating a pollinator meadow in her home brought my attention to the April 3, 2022 article in the New York Times about a movement in Appleton, Wisconsin, begun two years ago, now is becoming nationwide. It is called, “No-Mow May.” By chance this week I saw two minutes of a local news broadcast, and the lead story was the adoption of “No-Mow May” by households in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina.
After only two years, the data is very encouraging. This small practice of restraint is allowing the increased health, diversity, and vigor of that workhorse pollinator, bees. This kind of news is the kind we need in April on Earth Day–one simple but powerful step that all of us can consider taking right now and in the sweet spring days ahead. My poem today (“No-Mow May”) is a mediation of this set of ideas and actions. The photographs above come from the warmer April of 2017. The ones below from our chilly house and garden here in 2022.
I was introduced to the poetry of Seamus Heaney when I was in graduate school. Even though money then was extremely tight, I bought two slender paperback collections of his poems then, Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Field Work (Farrar, Straus, Giroux; 1979). As you can see from the photograph of the remaining volume, I read them and read them almost into tatters. When Heaney spoke at the Guthrie in Minneapolis 1996, shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I was thrilled to be in the audience. (Thank you, MPR, for archiving the recording of his talk that day!)
His work undoubtedly stands the test of time, and I continue to see new facets of his understated brilliance and expansive vision each time I read a poem anew. Oddly, I don’t see any direct influence in my own work. Maybe it is so pervasive I am blind to it? Or perhaps Heaney is so much part of the soil of Ireland (in addition to being a citizen of the world) that he cannot be imitated? I don’t know. But I thought that this morning I would share the opening lines of his homage elegy poem to Boston’s own Robert Lowell. This poem is simply called “Elegy.” In opening my copy to it today, the spine shattered, which I find somehow appropriate.
Elegy
The way we are living,
timorous or bold,
with have been our life,
Robert Lowell,
the sill geranium lit
by the lamp I write by,
a wind from the Irish Sea
is shaking it--
here where we sat
ten days ago, with you,
the master elegist
and welder of English...."
Seamus Heaney
Background on My Poem for the Day, “Letter to a Yellow Chair”:
This book was an eye-opening gift to me from a friend (Thank you, Ann!) Through it, and the membership I now hold in the Cloud Appreciation Society, along with their daily email of an image and an explanation of the science behind clouds, I have become ever more alert to the forms and beauties of the skies. I even like cloudy days a little bit better–though not completely socked-in grey skies like Northfield is experiencing in this moment. Not enlightened enough for that, clearly!
Background for My Poem “Views/Points”:
This poem is a mystery to me. The orange and white just appeared. Possibly a longing for summer was the root of this imagist construction.
Sunflower in Our Garden, 2021 (Photos: Leslie Schultz)
Poet, essayist, and environmentalist Wendell Berry has long been acknowledged as an artist as well as a seminal thinker in reimagining human interactions with the lands we all depend upon. His poem, “The Sycamore,” is not one with which I was acquainted until after I finished writing my own this morning. I find them in harmony with each other.
Sycamore, UW-Madison Arboretum, June 2018 (Photos: Leslie Schultz)
Background for My Poem “Fun Fact”:
Today’s poem caused me to return (via the internet) to Winterthur, which I explored early this month to refresh my memory about the plantings there. I kept recalling a short and charming video made by the horticulturalists and an arborist on staff there called “The Top 10 Trees at Winterthur.” In particular, I was mulling about tree #2, the Sycamore.
When I lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana, there was a very tall sycamore in the back garden of the house I rented. It offered welcome shade. I loved to look at its bark. Sometimes long peelings of bark would drop on the tin roof of the porch with a melodic crash, rather like windchimes. The only sycamore I have seen in the Midwest is in the Arboretum on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I think the harsher climate of Minnesota they would not survive long here.
What really made me think about sycamores in general, and about the denizen of Winterthur, is that way that careful shoring up of its innate tendency to hollow out in maturity is thought to have extended its life. The shoring up (concrete and metal rods) does not show from the outside, and the tree appears healthy and stable. Is there a cost to the tree for this intervention? I cannot know, only wonder.
Here are a few more fun facts about sycamores:
Sycamores are sometimes called plane trees, buttonwood trees, or water beech.
An American sycamore tree can often be easily distinguished from other trees by its mottled bark which flakes off in large irregular masses, leaving the surface mottled and gray, greenish-white and brown. The bark of all trees has to yield to a growing trunk by stretching, splitting, or infilling. The sycamore shows the process more openly than many other trees. The explanation is found in the rigid texture of the bark tissue which lacks the elasticity of the bark of some other trees, so it is incapable of stretching to accommodate the growth of the wood underneath, so the tree sloughs it off
The trunks of large trees are often hollow.
The sycamore tree is the largest deciduous trees in the Eastern United States. It grows to 30 meters tall and lives nearly 600 years.
Etymology: Middle English: from Old French sic(h)amor, via Latin from Greek sukomoros, from sukon ‘fig’ + moron ‘mulberry’.
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.
I think that this poem reads well on the page, but when read aloud it leaps up in a mesmerizing and terrifying shadow play. Frost’s terza rima exploration of uncertainty and spiritual ennui is one that I read aloud so often it has memorized itself in me. It reminds me of the haunting surrealist paintings of Giorgio Di Chirico, especially his “The Nostalgia of the Infinite” (1911-1913, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.)
For me, Frost’s poems have a dark, brooding, incantatory beauty that casts a spell on the hearer or reader. Certainly he was an ambitious man–ambitious in the artistic and worldly senses, both. For these reasons, he seems a fitting pairing with the Shakespearean landscape that cropped up in the poem I wrote today.
Background on My Poem “A Fugue of Dark Questions”:
Yesterday, Tim, Julia, and I were recalling our first college-visit trip. I hadn’t known that Julia enjoyed the tiny and uncomfortable cabin we stayed in on the shore of Lake Erie after our visit to Oberlin and its Conservatory, or that she loved watching that evening, for the first time, reruns of the old television comedy, “Gilligan’s Island,” on a tiny black and white set.
Then, last evening, I read in the latest issue ofVogue magazine about the new production of Shakespeare’s tragic play, Macbeth, starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga that opens in New York City this evening. And I remembered the ambitious fun of reading Macbeth as a family, as a kind of weird trio invoking the Bard’s vistas as we traveled the Midwest. This poem is thinking about that memory, and ideas of ambition and double-edged awareness, as in the word, “fugue,” which has applications in both classical music and abnormal psychology.
