Some Poems for the Weather

Does anyone else feel bothered and conflicted by the fact that its the end of May, the highpoint of spring, and yet its rainy and cold?  I am certainly one of this opinion.  In keeping with my last post, I've got a couple poems to recommend for my current mood.

This first one is a bit obscure, and maybe I've got the interpretation all wrong, but I've always imagined this poem as perfect for a wet, Spring day.  Brought to you by Ezra Pound.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The street in front of my house.

Ezra's work can often cause me to tear my hair out, but I adore this imagist poem of his.  As a side note, imagism is exactly what it sounds like, poetry (or any other form of writing, really) that constructs a single image.  In the case of this poem, I'd argue that there are actually two simultaneous images constructed, but the beauty of it is the way they combine seamlessly into one another.  Just as the strange faces of  a crowded metro station blend in and out of each other, so too do delicate cherry blossoms melt into the rain soaked pavement.  LOVE IT!

This next poem is by my beloved Seamus Heaney.  Lucky lucky us, my gr.11 IB class read several Heaney poems throughout our class.  This is my second favourite of his almost entirely brilliant body of work, failing only to surpass "Black Berry Picking", which is more suitable for the hotness of summer.

The Railway Children

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

We were eye-level with the white cups

Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

East and miles West beyond us, sagging

Under the burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we know nothing

Worth knowing.  We thought words travelled the wires

In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light

Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

These are both stolen from the internet...

...but they fit the poem beautifully.  

If anyone is a wordsmith, its Seamus Heaney.  There is something so simplistically gorgeous about the scene played out in this poem, for me anyways.  Just picturing a group of small children running alongside with telephone wires, imagining calls carried on them in whispers, puts a smile on my face.  The way Heaney transforms industrial and technological objects into ones as natural as a country landscape is just awesome.  From the lines being described as cursive, to the swallows sitting on the wires, to the imperative image of the raindrops, I can't get over how beautiful Heaney can make hunks and cords of metal sound like.  And oh man, the description of the children's faces being reflected in the teeny tiny raindrops is one that I've never ever forgotten, years after first reading the poem.

Kathaumixw 2010 - Powell River, BC.

And maybe I just have a thing for industrial beauty.