Traverse City Record-Eagle

Fleda Brown: On Poetry

YEARS AFTER THE GARDEN

Years after the garden closed on Adam

a thousand thousand gardens take its place

(hold my hand, I hear the waters rising)

roses, lemons, lilac, hemlock, grape.

A thousand thousand gardens take its place.

Is each an Eden waiting to be lost?

Roses, lemons, lilac, hemlock, grape.

What was God thinking when he made the apple?

Is each an Eden waiting to be lost?

Seeds of knowledge, carelessness, and greed.

What was God thinking when he made the apple?

Did he do it only for the story?

Seeds of knowledge, carelessness, and greed —

they say the icecap is already melting.

Did he do it only for the story?

Meringues of childhood melted on the tongue.

They say the icecap is already melting.

The angel still waits with his flaming sword.

Meringues of childhood melted on the tongue,

but innocence alone will never save us.

The angel still waits with his flaming sword:

flowers and vegetables, forests tremble.

Innocence alone will never save us.

How beautiful the world is in the morning.

Flowers and vegetables, forests tremble.

How beautiful the world is in the morning.

Years ago the garden closed on Adam.

Hold my hand, I hear the waters rising.

— Linda Pastan

(from The New Republic, April 29, 2010, by permission of the author)

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June 6, 2010

On Poetry: The common moment hits hard

By Fleda Brown ----

This morning I look up from the oil spill news at our beautiful little lake miles and miles from the Gulf. My heart's sick, our hearts are all sick. And we have our own local reasons — Asian carp, for example. And the zebra mussels have cleaned out the nutrients from our lake — no food for minnows, no local crawdads left. "Was each an Eden waiting to be lost?" asks Linda Pastan in her poem.

She names roses, lemons, lilacs, hemlocks, grapes as the things that make up the garden of the world, while the ice caps are melting, the water rising. Her poem is in the form of a pantoum (derived from pantun, a Malay verse form), a strict and complicated verse of interwoven repeating lines.

The repeating lines make us feel almost as if we're reading a nursery rhyme, or listening to an obsessive person — obsessive here because of worry, because of grief. As Pastan says, "forests tremble." And innocence — the innocence of the nursery-rhyme world — "will never save us," the speaker says.

This poem is smart. It lulls us by those repetitions and simple lines just as we've been lulled into not paying adult attention to our world. "The angel still waits with his flaming sword," we're reminded.

But the power-source of this poem, for me, is in the third line, which appears as a small matter — in parentheses — at first, and then as the terrible and decisive statement in the final line. Here the speaker steps forward in her vulnerable human voice asking for another person to hold her hand.

The difference between this poem and some of the many poems that decry what we've done to the earth is exactly that line, that crack in the poem that lets out the compressed human cry.

We didn't need this poem, however gorgeously skillful, to tell us that the seeds of these ecological disasters are in "knowledge, carelessness, and greed" or that "innocence alone will never save us." Preaching doth not a good poem make. It is when the poem finds a way to articulate the moment of our common anguish, the grasping for a hand, that it comes alive.

"Years After the Garden" is included in Pastan's new book, "Traveling Light," due out from Norton in January.

Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to record-eagle.com/onpoetry.

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