It’s the last day of April, the last day of National Poetry Month. So I’m going to play a little catch-up on this page with some poems that I love. I did not write them. I love them all the more.

These days are hard on people. All this standing back from one another. All the suspicion and worry. How will we manage? Where it might be lurking, this virus. For one reason or another, according to some loose association in my mind, each of the poems I include help me loosen the knot of loneliness. And remind me, more than ever these days, it’s a little more we, and a little less me.

Work has been a good distraction. So I’ve been absent from this page working on a stage play adaptation of The Poet of Tolstoy Park. I just finished the first draft. It’s parked on the window ledge like Granny’s apple pie, cooling, before I go back and have a taste and find what needs spitting out, and what does it need to brighten the flavor.

I pray you are yourself these days creating something. In the garden, or the kitchen, at the desk in the study, or the easel in the sunroom. In the workshop or at the sewing machine. Wherever and whatever. Anything that puts back some of what’s falling away.

I’ll make a comment or two, before or after the selections. Maybe trying to tighten up those loose threads for why I picked the poem. And, I hope you’ll Google the poet and go deeper into the talent suggested here.

The Knockdown Question by Les Murray

Why does God not spare the innocent?
The answer is not in the same world as the question.
And if I could answer it,
you would shrink from me in terror.

I think of grandmothers and babies, and all the good people in between who, every instant, are not spared. I think of the “insiders” like John the Baptist, and Jesus whom he baptized; and, Thomas, Simon the Zealot, Philip, Simon Peter, Matthias, Matthew, Jude, James son of Alpheus, James son of Zebedee, Bartholomew, and Andrew; and, Paul who wrote the letters. I think of Stephen—and Saul’s hand in that killing. How none of these were spared. Why, indeed?

If the poet could answer the knockdown question, he says you would shrink from him in terror. And what answer, what insight into the life-and-death motivations of God, would make a man wither in fear? Might the poet think the innocent are targeted? That would recoil the devout and the faithful. And, yet, Les Murray was a devoted Catholic, on a par with Flannery O’Connor.

Maybe this next 800-year old poem from a Sufi priest offers a radically different answer.

The Tent by Rumi

Outside, the freezing desert night.
This other night inside grows warm, kindling.

Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
We have a soft garden in here.
The continents blasted,
cities and little towns, everything
become a scorched, blackened ball.

The news we hear is full of grief for that future,
but the real news inside here
is there’s no news at all.

But where’s the path toward Rumi’s tent, so we, too, can get “inside here”?

Leaves of Grass (from the preface) by Walt Whitman

This is what you shall do:

Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown
or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons
and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem
and have the richest fluency not only in its words
but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes
and in every motion and joint of your body.

And Whitman also invites us to look to nature for courage, for evidence of providence.

Song of Myself [Book 3 of Leaves of Grass]
Section 31:

I believe a leaf of grass
is no less than the journey work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect,
and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels….

Many years ago, on page 47 of William Gay’s debut novel The Long Home, I read a paragraph that staggered my mind, caused me to make a small sound in my throat and shake my head. What? Who in Heaven’s name writes like that? The previous pages—and the rest that followed—were equally otherworldly. But this ‘graph. Well.

And I knew as I followed the story that the author was describing a Sunday morning after a big drunk in the hills of east Tennessee. The time was during Prohibition, and the roadhouse that hosted the Saturday night binge was hidden from the law back in the woods. The sun was coming up and it was going to be a scorcher and there were terrible bad hangovers revving up as some men and a few women scattered among the bushes found themselves waking up, still alive. But barely. Here’s the paragraph formatted to look like a poem.

The Long Home by William Gay

Morning. A hot August sun was smoking
up over a wavering treeline.
Such drunks as were still about,
struggled up slowly beneath
the malign heat slowly and painfully,
as if they moved in altered time,
or through an atmosphere thickening to amber.
The glade was absolutely breezeless
and the threat of the sun imminent and horrific.
The sweep of the sun lengthened.
Windowpanes were lacquered with refracted fire.
Sumac fronds hung wilted and benumbed as the
whores and smellsmocks rose bedewed
from the foxglove and nightshade.
Strange creatures averse
or unused to so maledictive a sun
they were heir to a curious fragility as if,
left to the depredations of the sun,
their very flesh would sear and blacken,
their limbs cringe and draw like those of scorched spiders.
The cool breath of the abyss drew them
through the undergrowth like
a magnet aligning iron filings on a glass slide.

And that last line, there’s the hereafter for our sufferings. We will come out of this tangled undergrowth.

Two poems that lean me toward the promise of something cool.

Dove that Ventured Outside by Rainer Maria Rilke

Dove that ventured outside, flying far from the dovecote:
housed and protected again, one with the day, the night,
knows what serenity is, for she has felt her wings
pass through all distance and fear in the course of her wanderings.

The doves that remained at home, never exposed to loss,
innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness;
only the won-back heart can ever be satisfied: free,
through all it has given up, to rejoice in its mastery.

Being arches itself over the vast abyss.
Ah, the ball that we dared, that we hurled into infinite space,
doesn’t it fill our hands differently upon its return:
heavier by the weight of where it has been.

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower by Rainer Maria Rilke

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

(Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29)

The month of May ushers in blueberry season here. And that is its own kind of message and blessing. God’s gift to the innocents.

Picking Blueberries by Laura Gilpin

A summer shower but sunlight towards evening
I was leaving to pick blueberries
when you called, telling me of your mother’s death,
not unexpected, but your voice was brittle
as twigs broken by a sudden storm.

A full life, she had
children and grandchildren,
people she loved, those who loved her,
an emptiness now
where her life held tight to others.

I wish I could lift you out of the darkness
to bring you here to pick blueberries with me
in the last of the evening light,
to taste in each small globe
the warmth of the sun
the richness of all that is good and sweet
in this world.

I wish you could know
the comfort of picking blueberries in the evening
feeling in the last light for the ripest ones,
the ones that pull away easily
from the stem, eager to let go,
like your mother, falling gently
into God’s waiting hand.

I should have seen something coming. But I didn’t put it all together until yesterday when my energies were all burning bright and the psychic winds were blowing from just the right direction. That’s what happens on your birthday. And yesterday I marked the entry into my 72^ndyear on the planet. So, of course it would be the day I’d see how all the signs fit together.

First there was just one of these gossamer chutes, some thin and dainty seed floating on a silver silken halo of fine and thin filaments like a tuft of pure white cotton. There it landed right at my feet as my little dog Bobby and me headed for the car. At first I thought it was from a dandelion. And then I bent down to pick it up and realized I did not recognize it at all. But I knew I would claim the prize, another talisman for display at my writing desk. I pinched the seed ever so gently and turned around, heading back into the cabin to find a spot for it. Immediately, I decided to nest it into my dreamcatcher.

I took a picture and sent it to my friend Martin, and asked him to tell me, please, from what plant did it originate. He did not know. And he knows everything about about our coastal flora and fauna. I put the picture through my Google Lens app and it told me I’d captured a caterpillar. I took another close-up shot and tried again. This time it said dandelion. Not even close. (One of you will know and will reply to tell me. For now, we’ll move on.)

When I got back from my trip to the store, there on the boardwalk to my cabin was another of the chutes. This time lightly attached to a piece of a broken oak branch. Too pretty to pass up. I had to walk very slowly so I didn’t dislodge the chute with that whiskery plume made for flight. Once inside, I tucked the stick into an opening on the base of my old Tiffany lamp. In the few days since, I haven’t spied another of the airborne seeds.

And now that I have deciphered their message, they are all the more special to me. Here, let me tie a thread around this.

A friend had few days before given me a collection of her favorite poems that she bound together in a little book. I put it beside my antique typewriter, and later that evening, standing at my desk, I did the thing that I am wont to do with books of poetry: I let it fall open to the poem of its choosing. And there on the right-reading page, opposite a totally blank left-reading page, was a poem of nine lines (of course—my thing with 9s). I stood there and read slowly, and with the last line, where the poet herself tied a golden thread around the image of her thoughts, my eyes were wet and my throat was tight. I felt it coming on and didn’t try to man-up against the urge rising from my chest.

I stepped back and sat down in my chair. I could not, nor did I try, to shake off the emotion that in my life of reading poems has happened only one other time. But, even then, not like this. Some few minutes later, I was released back into the mundane, I went to Amazon for a book of the poet’s work. I found two copies from used sellers. One for $899.99, and the other, listed in “very rough condition” for $4,401.74. The spell I’d been under at reading from this poet, was dashed and broken against a cold cliff of capitalist greed. Or something like that. Anyway, I used rough expletives.

Then, having once been a used bookseller, I turned to Advanced Book Exchange, or ABEBooks.com, my first source for hard-to-come-by titles. I found seven copies. Two paperback reprints for $158.51 and $163.26. The five used hardbacks started at $500 and went up to $721. I did not click buy on any of the offerings at either site.

Then I Googled the poet. She was from Fairhope! She had landed her book with Doubleday in New York and had won the prestigious Walt Whitman Award for Poetry. She died here in 2007 at the age of 56. Not only was she a poet, but she worked most of her life as a nurse devoted to improving patient care in hospitals around the country. She had the same last name of a man with whom I have been friends for forty years. I called Martin. I call Martin about many things. I asked him was she perhaps related to my friend. “His sister,” he said. I thanked him and asked could I read her poem to him. He said yes. I began, felt my voice begin to break, struggled on through to the end and quickly got off the phone. I don’t know why the poem drills straight into my soul and pokes a hole there. I am also glad it does.

Next day I was wrapping up with my art director in San Francisco the design of my new book of prose and poems called Syllables Go By that went on sale today wherever you buy books. I asked could I share a poem with her. “Someone else’s,” I said. She agreed and I emailed it and before the day was over, she texted me to tell me she’d just read the poem. “I am transformed,” she said. Then, next day she emailed to me a little script she wrote up between herself and her husband, a recap of their conversation when she’d also shared the poem with him. I wish I could send her work around the world and back again, and everyone would talk about it.

I called my friend, the poet’s brother, and within the week found myself seated with him in his home, hanging on his every word as he answered my questions about his sister with stories all the way back to their childhood. Then he told me how the poem I love was born in his sister’s imagination when she’d been a little girl. He told me that she saw the subject of her poem in an odd little out-of-the-way roadside museum their father took them to on a weekend trip.

My friend turned and disappeared for a moment and rejoined me holding in his hand a copy of a book of her poems. I told him about the scarcity of her books and the wild internet prices. Then he read to me from the book two other poems, his own favorites, that were equally powerful works of art. And I saw why she won the poetry prize that she did. Then he handed the book to me and said he had inscribed it for me, that his sister would be very pleased for me to have her book. “I have two other copies,” he said. I took the book and held it to my chest and thanked him, mumbling something—I can’t remember what.

When I got home, back to my cabin, back to my desk, and put the book down there. Only then did it register with me that the image on the cover was a dandelion. With chutes on the fly. A cover photo of what, in the real, ornamentally floated mere inches above the book.

And so last night, at an author event at our Page & Palette bookstore, where I introduced the writer to a room of 50 people, I asked, “By a show of hands, how many in this room of avid readers and fans of books and authors know the name Laura Gilpin?” Three hands were raised. “Then I’ll introduce to you, not only Mandy Haynes, the author I’m seated beside,” I said, “but also Laura Gilpin, a Fairhope poet you should come to know.” And I did so by reading to the room, in a strong and manly voice, the beautiful poem that made me come undone when I first read it days before.

I did not mention the pair-of-chutes (yes) I found nor the image on the book’s cover. I will (as I continue to wonder why) talk about that marvelous and magical synchronicity when I do a reading from my own little book at Page & Palette on St. Patrick’s Day. I will also read aloud another of Laura’s poems. And I will do so every time and anywhere I am invited to read from my book. I have offered to help, if I may, to bring back into print Laura’s poems. Maybe some other little girl or boy, that way, can find the inspiration to one day raise their own voices to praise mystery and beauty and truth as Laura did.

Here is her poem that I love:

The Two-Headed Calf by Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow, when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky,
there are twice as many stars as usual.