My calendar says I am to post a blog today! We just moved to the lake, and I am totally unprepared. I’m unprepared for everything, the riots, the bloodshed, the danger our democracy is in. How easy it would be to turn loose our own power, to want someone in ultimate authority who will handle things for us! How easy to give up, how hard to keep on being aware, to be witness and speak what we witness. Painful. How can anyone want to write under such conditions? How pitifully frail poems about flowers seem!
Common Morning Glory
Yet I have an inclination to write poems about Michigan wildflowers. There are so many along the road where I walk. Mowers have not cut them down, so the fields are a haze of purple star thistle and blue cornflower. Morning glories, daisies, Bouncing Bett, Bladder Campion. I have taken some photos and maybe in a gentler time I’ll write the poems.
The thing is, no one pays attention to these little brightnesses. We’re staring down the barrels of guns, we’re protesting in the streets. Meanwhile, the wildflowers survive, sometimes half-hidden in the grass, but always reaching for enough sun to continue on. They’re twining through the grass, they’re casting their seeds to the wind. Not everything is collapsing around us.
Milkweed in bloom.
What good will it do to write these poems? What good does it do for the tiny Daisy Fleabane to bloom all over the yard before the mower chops it down? Depends upon what you mean by good. If I view history as, well, history—a trajectory, sometimes up, sometimes down—you could say the poems, the daisies, make no difference at all if they don’t change the trajectory.
News broadcasts give us graphs, but they’re only graphs. There are individual people lying in hospital beds; there are individual doctors and nurses, working 12 hours a day. Each blessed one. When I had cancer, my oncologist told me, at my insistence, the odds of my survival. He didn’t want to. He said, “You’re an individual. There are so many causes and conditions that will affect your survival, these larger numbers are basically meaningless.
Cornflower.
Not to throw out the graphs. They’re helpful, of course. The big picture is made up of tiny dots, however. It’s the tiny dots that determine the big picture. I happen to be one who loves the tiny dots. I feel a deep kinship with the almost invisible blooms. You could take this thought and make a moral out of it if you wanted to. But no flower ever unfurled to teach anyone a lesson. When the lessons start up in our heads, what an act of aggression against the poor flower! Making it stand for something else. Using it to further our agenda.
How is it possible to love a flower and have no agenda? Maybe it isn’t. Making a poem of it is an agenda. I guess all that’s possible is to see the petals, the stamen, the leaves, as clearly as possible, with as pure appreciation as possible. Letting it be itself.