Poetry, What's It Good For?

   It's Holy Saturday, which the Church calls the holiest day of the year. Jesus died yesterday, and tomorrow the tomb will be found empty. On Sunday afternoon He started appearing to His followers. It's presumed that sometime on Saturday He returned to life and went to the places of the dead and released the souls there,  He then opened the gates of Heaven for everyone from Adam and Eve to John the Baptist.
   Easter for me always marked the official end of winter and the start of spring. It's been a long and snowy winter here. There was a wicked little storm just last week, But it's amazing how quickly those mountains of snow the city workers piled up around town through the winter have shrunk after a few days in the 50s.

   This pic is of one of the last snowbanks in our yard. It's supposed to get into the sixties today and tomorrow, so I doubt if this little drift will make it to Easter Monday. It reminded me of a drift I saw as a kid while hiking with my father through Arnold Arboretum near our home in Roslindale, Mass. This arboretum is a 281 acre collection of trees from around the world, owned by Harvard and open to the public.

   The arboretum was only a twenty minute walk from home.  We always cut through a tiny 18th century cemetery with death's heads carved into the thin slate tombstones. Once in the arboretum we passed under the branches of a large shrub, leafed out now in early May. There in the shade we spotted a patch of snow. "Curse your crystals!" I remember my father saying. He hated snow.

   Why I remember certain things, I don't know. Several years later, as an English Major at Boston College, I remember Fr, Shea, S.J., talking about bad poetry. He said a student had once given him a poem about a worm on a stick. He asked the student if the worm was supposed to be Jesus on the cross. No, it was just a worm on a stick that he had seen while out walking.

   Fr. Shea  told us a poem should mean something if it expects to be remembered. I've always felt sorry for that student and his poem, and even for the worm. I have remembered the poem, but only because of the priest's condemnation, if condemnation it was. Excommunication might be a better term.

   The memory of that pathetic little poem put me in mind of a collection of poetry I came across several years ago in an antique mall in Grand Forks. The collection was in a huge tome, like one of those giant family bibles not meant to be read. I could have bought it for ten bucks. Twenty years previous it had sold for fifty dollars! It was filled with poems submitted by ordinary people who would then pay fifty bucks to see their work in print. I was glad Fr. Shea wasn't around.

   The authors each had a small head shot of themselves above their poem, but with no biographical facts. I remember one poem from the Spurned Love, Female, section which said, roughly, that "you took my love and walked all over it." I couldn't read more than a couple of these. There was another by a man, no pic: 

"My kids all begotten,

"My poor wife forgot.

"My brain once so randy,

"Now random with rot."

   Sad. There were hundreds and hundreds more like this, on every subject from flowers and bunnies, to deceased spouses who weren't so bad in retrospect. I put the book back on the shelf. I wonder if it's still there.
   Most books of poetry aren't so heavy. Most new collections come in slender volumes, written by professors of literature. Very few people make a living off their poems. I think Robert Frost did, and Dr. Seuss.  The semi-intellectual magazines always throw in a couple of poems, sometimes good, sometimes incomprehensible.
   I could write a poem about that patch of snow I discovered with my father, but it would have to have a meaning. I had been on the verge back then of being able to hike over to the arboretum without a parent, something I would go on to do many, many times. The place had a stream and some rocky cliffs. A perfect playground hidden away in the city. So my poem could view the snow as the dissolving parental ties as I grew out of childhood.
   And the dying drift in our yard; would that be the dissolving ties between myself and this world?

Cryonics time?