National Poetry Month

“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

Each April, I stroll through Freedom Park and delight in the annual explosion of cherry blossoms. A profusion of pale pink petals drift down like confetti, and propelled by the breeze, skitter lightly across my path.

This impressionistic landscape could have been painted by Georges Pierre Seurat or Camille Pissarro, their brushes fanatically dabbing dots of magenta redbud blooms, dappled golden light on water, tiny unfurlings of viridian leaves.

The sensual bounty of early spring inspires wonder beyond words. But still, the poets try.

April is the perfect month to celebrate poetry. I cannot look at the reckless flowering that surrounds me without thinking of Tony Hoagland’s poem, “The Color of the Sky”:

… a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;
 overflowing with blossomfoam,
 like a sudsy mug of beer;
 like a bride ripping off her clothes,
  
 dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,
  
 so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
 It's been doing that all week:
 making beauty,
 and throwing it away,
 and making more.
 

And then there’s Linda Pastan’s description of April in her poem “The Months”:

In the pastel blur
 of the garden,
 the cherry
 and redbud
 shake rain
 from their delicate
 shoulders, as petals
 of pink
 dogwood
 wash down the ditches
 in dreamlike
 rivers of color. 

It’s been going on for ages, this affair that lovestruck poets have with the seasons and rhythms of nature.

The poetry of the Romantic era originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century with invitations such as this from William Wordsworth (“The Tables Turned”):

Come forth into the light of things, 
 Let Nature be your teacher. 

According to John Keats (“On the Grasshopper and the Cricket”):

The poetry of the earth is never dead. 

During the late 1800s, here in the US, Sitting Bull, Chief of the Lakota Sioux Nation, issues these words: “Behold, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love! Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.”

And many years later, e.e. cummings shares this prayer of gratitude:

i thank You God for most this amazing
 day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
 and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
 which is natural which is infinite which is yes 

But poems set in nature often do more than simply honor the beauty and impermanence of nature; they explore our personal connections with the earth.

Gardeners like to cite Ralph Waldo Emerson’s abbreviated line: “Earth laughs in flowers.” Taken on face value, who wouldn’t love this charming, playful idea? But his full words strike a serious note in the poem “Hamatreya.” Earth is laughing, yes, but in response to generations of landowners who say of their farmland:  

‘Tis mine, my children’s and my name’s…’ 

  Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys 
 Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; 
 Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet 
 Clear of the grave…  

There’s never been a greater calling for environmental poems that clarify our relationship with nature and our obligation to upcoming generations. And they warn us that our human actions are impacting the planet and its inhabitants in harmful ways. Poet and conservationist Wendell Berry says, “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”

Gary Snyder, referred to as the “poet laureate of Deep Ecology,” sanctions this creed in his poem “For All”:

 I pledge allegiance to the soil
 of Turtle Island,
 and to the beings who thereon dwell
 one ecosystem
 in diversity
 under the sun
 With joyful interpenetration for all.

And Joy Harjo, a contemporary poet and member of the Mvskoke Nation, writes in her beautiful poem “Remember”:

Remember the earth whose skin you are:
 red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
 brown earth, we are earth.
 Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
 tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
 listen to them. They are alive poems.

“Nature is no longer the rustic retreat of the Wordsworthian poet. … [it] is now a pressing political question, a question of survival.”

Jay Parini, Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary American Nature Poetry