April 26: A Hundred Years Ago, Horton Hears, Poem from "Kyrie"

The sonnets from Ellen Bryant Voigt's collection Kyrie have great resonance for our current time.  In case you haven't noticed.

The world has been through this before.  About a hundred years ago.  Millions of people died.  Everyone walked around with face masks on.  Sheltered in place.  There were so many bodies that they had to be buried in mass graves, without ceremony or prayer.  And then, the Spanish flu subsided, and the world went about its business of dealing with the Great Depression.  Another World War.  A Cold War.  Nuclear proliferation.  Climate change.

And now the universe has brought us back to ground zero again.  We're all wearing masks.  Staying home.  Hundreds of thousands of people are sick and dead.  A world economy in shambles.  Throw into that mix, in my country, a leader who doesn't believe in science.  Or truth.  We have reached a tilting point.

I've been thinking about one of my favorite books when I was a kid.  Horton Hears a Who.  I imagine that our world is right at this moment balanced on a clover carried by a friendly elephant.  We're either going to be boiled in oil or we're going to shout from our rooftops our barbaric "YAWP!"--not going gently into that good night.  (Yes, I'm mixing metaphors and poets here.  So shoot me.)

We need to learn from this time.  I came across the story of Jonathan Coelho, a 32-year-old husband and father who recently died of Covid-19.  He wrote a letter on his phone to his wife and kids before he was sedated and intubated.  Here, in part, is what he said:

I love you guys with all my heart and you've given me the best life I could have ever asked for . . . I am so lucky it makes me so proud to be your husband and the father to Braedyn and Penny.  Katie you are the most beautiful caring nurturing person I've ever met . . . you are truly one of a kind . . . make sure you live life with happiness and that same passion that made me fall in love with you.  Seeing you be the best mom to the kids is the greatest thing I've ever experienced . . .Let Braedyn know he's my best bud and I'm proud to be his father and for all the amazing things he's done and continues to do . . . Let Penelope know she's a princess and can have whatever she wants in life.  I'm so lucky.

That is the greatest lesson of this pandemic.  It's about finding out what's really, truly important.  It's not whether you can get your hair done.  Or go out to Red Lobster for dinner.  It's about love.  Period.  Simple as that.

Saint Marty wishes you all a peaceful, love-filled Sunday evening.

from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

Thought at first that grief had brought him down.
His wife dead, his own hand dug the grave
under a willow oak, in family ground--
he got home sick, was dead when morning came.

By week's end, his cousin who worked in town
was seized at once by fever and by chill,
left his office, walked back home at noon,
death ripening in him like a boil.

Soon it was a farmer in the field--
someone's brother, someone's father--
left the mule in its traces and went home.
Then the mason, the miller at his wheel,
from deep in the forest the hunter, the logger,
and the sun still up everywhere in the kingdom.

November 2: Lost Child, A Song, P.O.E.T.S. Day

...All the time the chestnuts and the jug went round and round, and bye-and-bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim, who had a plaintive little voice, and sang it very well indeed...

Not too many people know Tiny Tim sings in A Christmas Carol.  Except for the musical version of the book, Tiny Tim does not sing in any other movie adaptation that I recall.  I particularly love the description of Tim's voice ("plaintive little"), which just reinforces how sick and weak he is.  Dickens is great a depicting small, doomed children.  He does it in quite a few of his novels.  Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.  Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son.  Smike in Nicholas Nickleby.  And, of course, we have Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.  That's a pretty long list of sick and dying kids.  The fact that Tim's song is about a lost child in the snow isn't very surprising.  It strengthens Tim's vulnerability.  He is singing about a lost child and he is a lost child himself.

Today is P.O.E.T.S. Day.  That stands for Piss On Everything Tomorrow's Saturday Day.  I was introduced to this term by one of my English professors when I was an undergraduate.  He would gleefully come into the classroom every Friday, carrying an anthology of poems, and, for the first 15 minutes of class (sometimes for the entire hour), he would read us poems.  He took the day seriously.  He didn't believe in working too hard on Fridays.  I remember those days as some of the best I ever spent in a college classroom.  I felt like Ethan Hawke in Dead Poets Society, listening to Robin Williams read Walt Whitman.  It was great.

Yes, I will be giving you a new poem today.  I have already begun working on it.  It will be included in my second post, this afternoon or evening.  At the moment, it's not quite formed enough to carve it electronically on this Internet cave wall, so to speak.  Never fear, though.  Poetry is on the way.

Saint Marty will sound his barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world very soon.


O Captain!  My Captain!