Foue Seasons Carol: A Biography of Flowers
Porter, Anne
POEMS by Anne Porter Four Seasons Carol The barbs of cruel Auschwitz Grow back again and again Hiroshima's poison Gluts the arsenals Famines invade and wither The lands of Africa, Coldness...
...November Sunrise Wild geese are flocking and calling in pure golden air, Glory like that which painters long ago Spread as a background for some little hermit Outside his cave, giving his cloak away, Or for some martyr stretching out On her expected rack...
...Then at their tips Like the green heads of many little serpents Each blindfolded by a tight filmy sheath The flower-buds appeared, Enlarged, grew lumpy, split...
...POEMS by Anne Porter Four Seasons Carol The barbs of cruel Auschwitz Grow back again and again Hiroshima's poison Gluts the arsenals Famines invade and wither The lands of Africa, Coldness and greed and war Multiply past counting The deaths of children . And the wounds of the poor Whose bitter wants and sorrows Are splinters of your Passion, Jesus, hunted Child...
...They are afraid of us We can never hold them And there's no room for us in their invisible ark, Our home is warring disobedient history...
...Freely accepting our one heedless glance...
...Living for days on nothing but water and darkness The rootlets thickened and the leaf-buds grew...
...Then grant us grace to bring them More than stale crusts and empty prayers That hinder your just kingdom...
...I took them home And stood them in a bowl of stones and water And closed them up in a dark place...
...I brought them out to the blank winter sunshine Where fed by light as flames by air The leaves flowed high and filled themselves with green...
...The headsman's donkey grazes...
...A few black cedars grow near by...
...Oaks and Squirrels Genesis 18:27 "I speak to my Lord though I am dust and ashes," A handful of ashes the wind will soon send flying Into the drifted oak-leaves under the hedge...
...A Biography of Flowers This is the history of three small brown onions...
...Then to the cloudy morning Of February's eleventh day There opened with birth's dazzling shock Miraculous white flowers And all in silence...
...You have granted me more time On earth than the squirrels, less time than the oak, Whose secret takes a hundred years to tell...
...Refugee Servant Twilight has silenced the thrushes And opens the evening star The sounds of tennis are over And now there are voices and laughter And the rattle of ice in glass, It's time to go down to the kitchen...
...By day The squirrels run like script along its boughs And write their lives with their light bodies...
...And lighter than a snake's shed skin The striped bud-cases peeled off...
...Each had two poles, at one A fringe of dried-up rootlets And opposite An inch-long leaf-bud like an ivory fang...
...No gardener ever rakes there Only the squirrels gather bedding there When they stack up their rustling nests...
...Small craftsmen steeped in anonymity like bees Gilded their wooden panels, leaving fame to chance, And the maker of this wing-flooded golden sky Forgives us all our ignorance Both of his nature and of his very name...
...Maria stops on the landing To pin up her black hair, Folding away like a letter The tin huts and Fierce mountains Of her far native country...
...Out of the acorn in the dirt Its wooden sticks come up Already knowing how to grow their leaves And when to spend them all, Knowing exactly How to thread up into a winter sky A dark-veined map like that of a great river Spun out in tapering streams, Twig by twig ascending and unfolding Until at night its topmost buds Enter the country of the stars...
Vol. 112 • May 1985 • No. 9
