On becoming weathered

 Friday of the coming week is April Fool’s Day. There is no truth to the rumor that it was named after those who believe this time of year in the North Country is actually Spring. Our current windchill is 20℉. Tonight’s actual low temperature should be around 17 ℉. There is some good news, though. This is the week when overnight temperatures are supposed to bottom out at 32 ℉. The longer it takes for Spring to actually arrive, the more we’ll appreciate it when it does, right? The midweek snow forecast no longer includes local accumulations. So that’s hopeful. Please don’t remind us of these observations when we’re complaining about heat and humidity come July and August.

4/19/13 previews of coming attractions?

Photo by J. Harrington

Do you remember that there’s a Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, OK? It’s scheduled to open this May 10. It will join the Woody Guthrie Center as a major attraction. I had lost track of the Dylan Center’s development and stumbled across it this morning as I was looking online for information about some of Joy Harjo’s work. Harjo is the current Poet Laureate of the US, the first Artist-in-Residence for Tulsa's Bob Dylan Center, and lives in Tulsa. Her book, An American Sunrise, is the NEA Big Read next month. All-in-all, that’s enough good and interesting news to limit my complaining about our unseasonable weather. I’ve just finished rereading Sunrise and have found the online version of Harjo’s Poet Laureate project, Living Nations, Living Words. Before Harjo, Tracy K. Smith’s project was American Conversations: Celebrating Poems in Rural Communities. I believe I’ve found something to do instead of “doom scrolling” on social media, at least until the weather warms and I can spend time outside without concerns about spring frostbite.

An Old Story

By Tracy K. Smith

We were made to understand it would be

Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,

Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 

 

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful 

Dream. The worst in us having taken over 

And broken the rest utterly down. 

 

                                                                 A long age 

Passed. When at last we knew how little 

Would survive us—how little we had mended 

 

Or built that was not now lost—something 

Large and old awoke. And then our singing 

Brought on a different manner of weather. 

 

Then animals long believed gone crept down 

From trees. We took new stock of one another. 

We wept to be reminded of such color. 

 

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.