Although William Ross Wallace may have coined the most ardently honest description of Mothers’ Day, before the malediction of American Marketing made a mockery of it, his brief citation still exudes a reality most humans wish was true: “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”
Like most poets, this commentator still believes the essence of what most of us wish were true is best conveyed in verse. Ergo, there are many ways and words to accomplish this. In her volume of poems “Your Native Land, Your Life,” Adrienne Rich writes: “You: air-driven reft from the tuber-bitten soil that was your portion from the torched-out village the Marxist study group the Zionist cell café` or C`heder Zaddik or Freudian, straight or gay woman or man O you stripped bared appalled stretched to mere spirit yet still physical your irreplaceable knowledge lost at the mud-slick bottom of the world how you held fast with your bone-meal fingers to yourselves each other and strangers how you touched held-up from falling what was already half-cadaver how your life-cry taunted extinction with its wild, crude ‘So What?’………You: air-driven: reft: are yet our teachers trying to speak to us in sleep trying to help us wake.”
“In these poems,” Rich states, “I have been trying to speak from, and of, and to, my country. To speak a different claim from those staked by the patriots of the sword; to speak of the land itself, the cities, and of the imaginations that have dwelt here, at risk, unfree, assaulted, erased…… I draw strength from the traditions of all those who, with every reason to despair, have refused to do so.”
From words like these, drawn from the heart of a poet, wife, mother, teacher, ultimately gay, proud American citizen, other American poets are inspired with a new optimism and hope for a better tomorrow for all Americans. A few short months ago, after reading them, this poet was moved himself, to write the following:
WINTERSET
All at once, the waning edge of a late
January sunset's incandescence
Detonates a gasp. This glinting
Flash of brilliance but a breath for some,
As nature measures it, that splash
Of mandarin tint against blue so
Faint, it wrings a tear. Tomorrow's
Morning sky will appear unchanged;
Perhaps an errant wisp rearranged but
Nothing taints this computation's sum,
That vows another spring will come.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors, and do not reflect the views of this station or its management.