An April Quartet, Part III: Bass Note of Blue, the Flowering

This Spring greets us with peril and possibility. More than a movie, more than any play or book in which we can flip fast to the end and find out what happens, walk out, grab a snack or turn the dang thing off we just don’t know, do we, when this will be over?

We find ourselves in the unlikely circumstance of being in a cast of characters in the great play of life. We are finding our way across the set, learning our lines, taking in each scene and looking for clues on how to solve the mystery. The new role that has been thrust upon us can feel chafing, burdensome and is, for many, more dire by the day.

Yet still, it is with us, the beauty, always beauty writ small and large, intricate and plain, right before our eyes. Beauty as a new beginning. Beauty as a balm for unanswerable hours. We’ve, always, had to figure our way out of something! Sometimes, with grace, other times by just getting by. Either way, we keep going from one day into another, and, thus, prevail.

We can be thankful for the Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay and its necessary medicine to walk us into another day and every one after that.

Let’s keep going, let’s gather as much beauty as possible. Why, The Garden Body: A Florilegium by Sylvia Legris, is rife with an elegant beauty.

Place D.H. Lawrence’s Purple Anemones beside George Elliott Clarke’s King Bee Blues and see what kind of flower-powered music they make!

Let Carol Muskie-Dukes’ Blue Rose, Matthew Dickman’s  Bluebells and a little Marigold by Mahogany L. Browne add color to your day.  Make it a day to relish The Sun and Her Flowers (Rupi Kaur). Flowers are not just for making a garland for your hair, poems are not just meant to be read as  scanning the sky for rain. Poems are meant to be embraced by the mind, held up, peered into and identified by scent.

In the Bass Notes of Blue, the Flowering resource list, you’ll find poems to pluck, each title a petal, of curious shape, some field holler in tremolo brightening before your eyes.

This is one in a four-part series. Read An April Quartet, Part I: In Alto, Poets Face That Discordant Sound and An April Quartet, Part II: Some Soprano Sops a Poem’s Bread (the Rising) and stay tuned for more posts.

~ posted by Chris