POETRY

I only remember one teacher from my High School in the small Delta town of Rolling Fork, Mississippi. 

Miss Long taught Language Arts.  It was my worst class that I passed with a D.     And yet, she is the teacher I remember.   She made us memorize poetry.   Sixty years later I still remember the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in old English:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendered is the flour;

Why that has staid with me, I don’t know; but the poem that made the greatest impression on me was The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic Trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

I cremated Sam McGee

I believe I had the Arctic in my soul even then, and story in poetry spoke to me. 

 

Years later I found Walt Whitman.  Much of his poetry doesn’t ring with me; but DRUM-TAPS, his memory of the carnage of the Civil War speaks direct to me as a combat veteran:

A sight in Camp in the daybreak grey and dim

As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,

As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,

Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying, Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,

Grey and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

Curious I halt and silent stand,

Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;

Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes?

Who are you my dear comrade?

Then to the second I step-and who are you my child and darling?

Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?

Then to the third- a face nor child nor ole, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

Young man I think I know you- I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.

My go-to is Robert Frost; a man of the homestead, of the north woods.   His stories in poetry are identifiable to me.  I feel I have known some of his people:

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Thank you Miss Long

I am sure long gone

For introducing me to stories

In rime and meter.

(All poems are in the public domain.)

the Ol’Buzzard