From the Poetry Garden 4
Here is the 4th. Session from the Poetry Garden. The first poem “In Ennerdale” (for Jenny) is already on this blog, the second new poem “Guelder-rose” is not. I can send you a copy or wait and I will put it up on here soon. It is my first poem about the Pandemic….and inspired totally by asking my partner, Max, for a word that described the colour of the berries on a Guelder -rose in our garden. “Vermillion”, he said. I knew the word but was not sure what colour vermillion was! I checked it out and was stunned by the perfect resemblance. The word, vermillion, took me to Hopkins’ poem, “The Wndhover” which I knew and loved. From his Kestrel I thought of our Kestrel pillaging the swallows nests.
In many ways the garden is full of other better poets; Hopkins is one, Eliot has his rose garden, and of course Andrew Marvel also has “The Garden”. My relationship with past writers is the resource that helps me through life so it is impossible not from time to time to spring from off their shoulders.
The Hug of Gaia 
I am heartened to have heard (and seen) you read “In Ennerdale,” which is so very evocative of Wordsworth but which also contains images so beautifully your own. I say “heartened” because both poems seem to reach across the pond to offer, in the first poem solace, and in the second to pose the great mysteries that so many of us are trying to unravel in this year of solitude and darkness. The allusions to Hopkins’ lines work beautifully to evoke a feeling of awe and wonder which I am grateful to be reminded of. Here there are, as yet, few harbingers of fall, but we have seen ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ in the environmental havoc that surrounds us in tail ends of hurricanes, even in photos of tornadoes not far away. We cherish, perhaps, a false sense of safety in our privilege and in those we love. But I am reminded, when I see you in your garden, of the beauty that can be invoked in solitude and/or with the right companion, if one is as open to life, in all its richness, as you are.
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Marcia, that’s beautiful thank you.
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