The Garden of Verse: Saluting Home-Grown Truths About Where We All Came From and Other Poems of Our Season

In the patriotic month of July, the idea of 'America' sent Verse-Virtual poets on a thematic dig through symbols, memories, generational retrospectives and hard looks at what I recently heard described as "our cultural moment." 

            Gee, whatever could that mean?

            Maybe Uncle Sam can help. Jim Lewis's bracingly original take on a familiar icon in his poem "shaving america" makes this vivid appeal:

"we need you, uncle sam/ need your rebellious hair/ waving white in the breeze/ need that familiar goatee/ flying like a white badge/ of courage..."
            Lewis's other poem in the July issue, "how long does it take," is a vivid verse essay on what could possibly be meant by the notion of a 'real' American... "not a fake, not an invader/ not an illegal, or undocumented/ but a real, good-as-a-gold-dollar american." Because, clearly, everyone's origins can be challenged on the grounds that we came from somewhere else. Even 'Indians,' the poem notes, are "a figment/ of some explorer's imagination." The implication from these few richly packed stanzas is that being 'real' is not a matter of where you or your ancestors were born.

            Firestone Feinberg's marvelous poem "After School" asks us to confront one of those 'anthem' words that Americans, and the world (at least in other 'cultural moments'), associate with this country. I won't spoil the ending by mentioning it here. A lot gets rolled into this poem's relatively few words and short lines, besides those cigarettes the poet recalls smoking at age fourteen. Consider these lines, curt as a teenage brush-off: "And your mother/ Is dead and you/ Are left with/ A father you/ Can't talk to". The smoking takes place not only after school but "By the/ Waters of Babylon/ And you remember/ The songs of/ Zion." A further deepening context in a very affecting poem.

            In "Honoring Ancestors," Joan Mazza writes of ancestors in Canicatti: "No one learned to read,/ but they knew of schools, saved lira for a steamship to America." Guess what happens "three generations later" to great-grandchildren who graduate from college, teach, speak two languages? They also "go back to the earth," grow basil, buy "semolina flour/ heart of the wheat from Italy,/ to make pannetone and pasta..." Do stories like this one -- regardless of whether these brave ancestors came from Italy or anywhere else in the world -- not make the USA a 'great' country and much richer than it would otherwise be? Why is this history not taught in schools?    

            Too much winning? When it comes to immigrant ancestors you have to take the eccentric with the ordinary, as Michael Minassian's poem "Naked Toes, Naked Stars" suggests. After his Armenian grandfather lost a big toe to a lawnmower, the poet visited him in the hospital and found him "rattling off a litany of complaints/ in a swift combination/ of four languages,/ confusing the hell out of the/ Puerto Rican nurse & Indian doctor ..." They wrap his foot "like some 20th/ century mummy from the Bronx" but fail to cushion his "cursing abilities" among other colorful traits. The poet's search for the missing digit brings the poem wonderfully back to those "naked stars."

          Tricia Knoll's poem "The Value of a Home" addresses the issue named by its title in terms both close to home and close to the heart. How do you put a value, the poem asks, to immaterial assets such as the "Christmas tree corner with green/ lights, a deck where poetry flowed/ into the woods, enough water/ in the creek it might be crying"--? This is a moving poem about the kind of migration we all make at one time or another from one someplace to live to another, and about the unquantifiable human value of 'home' to all of us fortunate to have one.  

          Penny Harter's poem   "Healing the Wound With Honey" flows from one of those scientific findings that reads like a kind of curiously wonderful found artifact. Research, apparently, has shown that "difficult-to-heal wounds respond well to honey dressings." I'd say this sounds like the stuff only poets can make up.

            Harter's poem begins with this perfect jumping off point: "It must have been inflicted in another life,/ this wound we can’t remember, not even sure/ whose it may have been." The poet illustrates those difficult wounds by way of a beautiful image "a wound/ of the spirit that even the heavy blue dressing/ of the sky can’t fix." So we must "learn the names of honey," and where we must offer this healing provides a deeply fitting ending I don't wish to spoil here.

            However strongly we may feel about America, our home is also the earth. Robbi Nestor's "Benediction to the Earth" is a prayer that both cites and summons the enduring blessings of the planet. An Ekphrastic poem accompanying an image by Ira Joel Haber on her V-V page, ("blue as a morpho" butterfly to quote from the poem), "Benediction" asks the rain clouds to "carry our heavy regrets" and drop them harmlessly on desert; and among other requests petitions the sun to bring us "the chambered face of the sunflower."

            I like sunflowers. I don't ask where they came from (earth is answer enough). I bless the rain that falls in New England, without wondering what other country or continent it may have visited. And I am glad that my country births so many wonderful poems. 

            You can find these poems and many others at http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html