poem a day 2024
Up in the mountain basins of Vermont we have had two major fallings in the last week: one come and go in a morning, and yesterday’s latest leaving a fluff across the landscape. Mother nature isn’t ready yet to let go!
On the the day of the first billowing blizzard, I ran into my downstairs neighbor as she unloaded items from her recent trip back home. Her family lives in a place only towns away from my own. She wished me an idiosyncratic “Happy spring!” to the halfmelted snow and muck around our feet.
We’ve been talking about garden plans, some raised beds to try and work on together. I feel unprepared to take on too many projects in the form of living plants. But I’m going to try. I want to participate and sometimes do, the other night taking in the birdfeeders she’s hung for her so we didn’t invite any friends who are too grizzled. We do invite some things - for instance, the chipmunk whose burrow I tried to uncover this morning from the piles of snow - but no more raccoons going through the broken trashcan. Please.
We’ve been sharing benefits of these bird feeders, the said items coming out of her truck bed being seeds designated for the neighborhood flocks.
All day long, our backyard is the talk of the town; friendly and foe birds swooping in and out of the small grass patch above the septic tank. The redwinged blackbirds are the most intimidating right now, seeing as there’s about 40 and they do not get along with anyone other than the handful of corvids who come by. The cardinals are her favorite, and the female I see at the feeder seems to get along with the hermit thrush and pigeons well enough. The tree sparrows don’t bother anyone and the blue jays attack anything they can see, regardless of its size.
The other week a scuffle happened, one neither my neighbor or I saw, and a small patch of feathers was left on the ground. ******* picked them up and saved a couple, both larger and smaller tufts of someone who scrapped and another who scraped back.
So still, rergardless of the foot and a half along every inch of grass, absolutely slathered atop in muddy birdfoot tracks, spring is coming. False spring doesn’t usually catch me, but I only learned later it was the official calendar-marked “first day of spring” when that first snow came. It feels at it usually is - a warmer early winter and sultry ending in muck. Perhaps I’m wrong.
I remember one time when ******** and I were talking about weather, and I decided I was unhappy that the seasons were changing from their origin. The heat of early September. They reminded me how the seasons don’t exist to be serving our framework for what they should or shouldn’t be. Fair, and important. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that something is changing in this world, because it is. Most of what I interact with are not necesarily healthy and good things. Or nearly as self-defining as I want them to be.
Instead, there is a blur and haze of hardship sweeping through. Bodies decimated and spectaclized past the point of their humanity, and only dependent on the witness of their shameful and desecrated selves. The innocent blood. The guilty blood. The blood that is human suffering. Other humans making sure to make human suffering a business of both greed an absolution. To swipe feathers from your own kind.
I am writing and working on things I suppose in the background of this. An unfinished play there, a first chapter of a novel hem, poem on endless poem fragment in journals and scrap paper. But there is the unbearable weight of what is not happening with me right now. How I am mentally unwell at times, how I am poor and getting laid off. How I am hurt and lonely. How I am sometimes so sensitive. How I am in grieving. How I am enraged.
How I myself play into this world. The snow melting, the garden beds, grifts and gritty ideological debates with no praxis. No action. No community. But I’ve also not got no community. And I’ve also not got no actions. The purpose of your being is defined by what it does. I only wonder if it’s ever enough.
Time is not something which can always wait. Radicalism does not have to always fester like an overfilled compost bucket. The engagement of the rotten isn’t something which must be inhaled in order to seed new soil but the air must be disturbed and the contents emptied, processed, grown.
A poem a day challenge is no replacement for community, for genocide is not poetry. It is not able to armament the oppressed. It does not press firm on open wounds. It does not feed starving. It does not convince them that “No! This is wrong!” I won’t even argue that it’s not a form of its own false spring.
I do not have answers and I am not going to shepard you. This is simply what has been sitting on my mind as I approach this month for the yearly challenge - to write a poem each day through April. A challenge, that if I don’t partake in, I think I’ll lose myself more than I’m willing to.
I invite you to as well. An easy sign up form has been added to the website. You can also try and contact me through Instagram. Thank you.
