Easter Sunday, April 20, 2014
Several of the poets whose poems were selected for exhibition in storefront windows on Figueroa, in Highland Park, went to a restaurant after we made a tour of the posted poems yesterday afternoon. One of the people serving our table of 10 was a young woman who had just arrived in town three weeks ago. Upon learning of what brought us together on this particular afternoon, she asked about our favorite poets and Suzanne Lummis promptly rattled off a list that went from T.S. Eliot to Denise Duhamel. She seemed content with a single response and valiantly tried to show that she, too, just read. She knew of Alice Walker and how Zora Neale Hurston’s work was rediscovered, but she seemed to think that Hurston had died very recently. She had not ever heard of the late Wanda Coleman, whose death and final reading at the Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles was recorded in one of the poems in a storefront window.
One poet I would have added to Suzanne’s list of favorite poets, which also included Weldon Kees, would have been Harry Northup, who sent me a recent poem this morning that is so deeply moving and full of solemn exhileration that I asked his permission to reprint it in my blog. He has kindly sent his permission, so it is with great pleasure that I celebrate this holiday with you by sending out this poem.
For My Love Sleeping
What do I see but the pressures
beating down
From all directions on the blue stone
with bright spots like burning coals
What do I see but headdresses & peacocks’
spread tails
An enormous rain
A sword as place a lightning point
What do I hear but flowers blooming
Like tails reaching upward
Like lights as bracelets forming
a bridge on water’s surface
What do I believe but a flower
in the moon
A shadow blocking its width in
front of the sun
To say who’s right would be to
recognize a sunflower fronting
my face close as a lion’s open mouth
To welcome would be to listen
To focus within the blue sky’s cycle
To turn within its circle
To remember missing the answer
that followed reason’s logic
To count stands in the middle
To find means to rescue
Stay within & not hide
To not escape means forever
To hand over above hands reaching
from the fire
The vase of flowers & clouds in the
sky remain lonely daffodils
Remembrance offers concision
the center of the propeller
Within stillness desire surenders
What desire has no fruit
What silence ignores hunger
What red flowers transform dusk
to death with twin yellow brightness
Glow dusk with white doves in trees
3 27 14
Harry E. Northup
http://timestimes3.blogspot.com/2014/03/for-my-love-sleeping-by-harry-e-northup.html?view=sidebar
About Bill Mohr