Taking poetic license with time

It’s almost the end of March. Although it’s sunny, the outside temperature is about half of the normal high for this time of year, after one of the top ten snowiest winters on record around here. Next month, April, is National Poetry Month, so I want to disregard what’s left of March and start April early [although I reserve the right to return to March if things improve in the next day or two].

Here’s a look at this year’s poetry month poster, which  you can request for free at the preceding link:

2023 National Poetry Month poster

I find this year’s poster to be a delight. Last year’s was nice although the year before's was not to my taste. The caption in this year's poster is from Ada Limon’s poem The Carrying, found below. I may reread my copy of her most recent volume, The Hurting Kind, “An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—.” It fits with several other books on interconnectedness I’m reading [such as The  Systems View of Life] and is less heavy than the Czeslaw Milosz volume I’m currently part way through.

After four year’s of tRUMP, three years of COVID, and the current socio-economic turmoil, I’m grasping for insights to help make sense of what increasingly looks like a crazy world. Much of poetry “...we were all meant for something”  helps me adjust and adapt. The question of what it is we were meant for gets raised by other poems and poets and makes me wonder if I [we] really should adjust and adapt. After you’ve read today’s poem, ask yourself “What’s the purpose of a deer, a mayfly, a dandelion?” Then think about what we are meant for.

The Carrying

Ada Limón - 1976-

The sky’s white with November’s teeth,
and the air is ash and woodsmoke.
A flush of color from the dying tree,
a cargo train speeding through, and there,
that’s me, standing in the wintering
grass watching the dog suffer the cold
leaves. I’m not large from this distance,
just a fence post, a hedge of holly.
Wider still, beyond the rumble of overpass,
mares look for what’s left of green
in the pasture, a few weanlings kick
out, and theirs is the same sky, white
like a calm flag of surrender pulled taut.
A few farms over, there’s our mare,
her belly barrel-round with foal, or idea
of foal. It’s Kentucky, late fall, and any
mare worth her salt is carrying the next
potential stake’s winner. Ours, her coat
thicker with the season’s muck, leans against
the black fence and this image is heavy
within me. How my own body, empty,
clean of secrets, knows how to carry her,
knows we were all meant for something.

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