I've never gotten
along terribly well with poetry. It started in elementary school in Mr.
Egawa's class where on a weekly basis we would draw a card out of a
deck and whichever Shel Silverstein poem happened to be on that
laminated card we had to memorize it by the end of the week and recite
it in front of the entire class. The main problems being: a) Shel
Silverstein wrote some really long poems, b) it had to be done FROM
MEMORY and c) it had to be recited in front of the entire class. No
thank you, please. I'll just sit here at my desk and practice my Denelian instead.
The poetry I was exposed to (read: forced to read) in high school was
not something that I enjoyed one bit, either. Analyzing the crap out
of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is an experience I could have done without.
And hey, just for kicks, why don't we do that in front of the entire class, too.
I admit, I am the sort of person who analyzes movies (thanks, Mr.
Hinman) or tries to figure out who a particular song might be referring
to -- or at least I used to be -- but poems are a different bird. They
seem as though they're meant to be sort of ethereal or downright vague
sometimes. And I'm ok with that.
Despite the fact that poetry and I have never been real tight, I heard
Garrison Keillor read the following [poem] on Writer's Almanac a month
or so ago and everything around me got kind of quiet and shiny. My
breath caught a bit in my throat and I let the poem float around me. It seems beautiful and true and right.
The Sorrows
by Gary Fincke
Whatever the Sunday, the sorrows kept the women in the kitchen,
My cousins and their mothers, my grandmother, her sister, all of them
Foraging through the nerves for pain. They signed and rustled and one would
Name her sorrows to cue sympathy's murmurs, the first offerings
Of possible cures: three eggs for chills and fever, the benefits
Of mint and pepper, boneset, sage, and crocus tea. Nothing they
Needed came over-the-counter through prescriptions not bearing
A promise from God, who blessed the home remedies handed down
From lost villages of Germany for the aunt with dizzy spells,
For the uncle with the steady pain of private swelling; for passed blood,
For discharge and the sweet streak from the shoulder. In the pantry,
Among pickled beets and stewed tomatoes, were dark, honeyed liquids,
The vinegar and molasses sipped from tablespoons for sorrows
So regular they spoke of them as laundry to be smoothed by the great iron
Of faith which sets creases worthy of paradise. And there, when only
A hum came clear, they might have been speaking from clouds like the dead,
But what mattered when the room went dark were the voices reaching into
The lamp-lit living room of men who listened then, watching the doorway
And nodding at the nostrums offered by the tongues of the unseen
As if the sorrows were soothed by the lost dialect of the soul,
Which whispered to the enormous ache of the imminent.
~ from The Fire Landscape: Poems
© University of Arkansas Press, 2008
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