April brings pasque flowers
Photo by J. Harrington
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As part of celebrating Easter and Spring and National Poetry Month, I'm happy to announce that the swallows are back in the house we put up years ago to attract purple martins. The blue birds are using the blue bird house. Last night I finally saw a couple of sandhill cranes flying through the neighborhood. There's a pair of wood ducks regularly visiting the small pond up the road. Oak leaf buds continue to swell and turn more green and, this morning, I found a bird feeder the bear dragged into the woods last year. (The afternoon will be spent cleaning and, if possible, reassembling it.)
sandhill cranes in flight
Photo by J. Harrington
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The Academy of American Poets suggestion to "Deepen your daily experience by reading Edward Hirsch’s essay “How to Read a Poem.” seems highly fitting for today. You might even be interested in learning that there's a book on Poetry As Spiritual Practice. Although I've read that, my copy of Hirsh's A Poet’s Glossary (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), is largely unread so far, nor had I, until this morning, read his helpful and reassuring essay. At the moment, I'm struggling with a several of Seamus Heaney's poems, in part because Heaney writes poems about topics, or includes references for which I have no frame, such as The Tollund Man. Hirsch informs us trhat we shouldn't expect to know what a poem is about at first reading.
I'm encouraged to find resources such as Hirsch's essay on the interwebs because learning how to read a poem seems like a wonderful antidote to the shortening of my attention span that much of the internet's content seems to be triggering. See what you make of this poem by Hirsch after you've read his essay. For one thing, I see it referring to a different kind of resurrection, or does it?
Early Sunday Morning
By Edward Hirsch
I used to mock my father and his chumsfor getting up early on Sunday morningand drinking coffee at a local spotbut now I’m one of those chumps.No one cares about my old humiliationsbut they go on dragging through my sleeplike a string of empty tin cans rattlingbehind an abandoned car.It’s like this: just when you thinkyou have forgotten that red-haired girlwho left you stranded in a parking lotforty years ago, you wake upearly enough to see her disappearingaround the corner of your dreamon someone else’s motorcycleroaring onto the highway at sunrise.And so now I’m sitting in a dimly litcafĂ© full of early morning riserswhere the windows are covered with sootand the coffee is warm and bitter.
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