Traverse City Record-Eagle

Fleda Brown: On Poetry

HOME TOWN PARK

Written for the opening of the new children's playground, Storvik Park, Anacortes

That crow, if there were wind,
might be a kite. Daisies are only white
until the mower comes again.
That child whining for a turn
on the slide could be yours,
or could be you, enough years gone.
That old woman who slid a stone
into her sweater pocket will take it out
and rub it with her thumb when she's alone.
That dry complaint is creaking swings.
A mother laughs & pushes.
Her daughter shouts & sings.
There, some boy counted the loose
change of love into a girl's hand, a ring
gathered & bent the light of stars onto grass.
There, a son collapsed on the damp seat
of a bench having said good-bye
at the funeral home across the street.
Here is where a gray dog decided not to bark.
He lies beside his gray master & listens
to the town grow quiet in the coming dark.
There's always more than one way in. Come. Stay
long enough to know what brought you here,
what you leave behind, what you take away.

— Sam Green

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August 1, 2010

On Poetry: A poem's public, private land

By FLEDA BROWN Local columnist

One of the dearest things about Traverse City is its parks. We live not far from the Open Space, and in the evenings I sometimes walk down to watch people playing volleyball, families still stretched out on blankets on the sand, other people like me walking to the end of the jetty to stare into the vast blue as it begins to mellow and sink into its evening haze. It's space for us to feel kindred, to watch the movements of the sky and of our lives as a joint enterprise. How incredibly valuable is mutual space!

A few years ago, I understand a local philanthropist was about to donate to our little village of Central Lake, where our cottage is, a plot of land for a park just on the other side of the bridge, facing Hanley Lake. Suddenly it was bought up by a developer and before most of us knew what happened, the space was filled with condos. Breaks my heart every time I drive by. Not that I begrudge the people who own those condos or the developer who wanted to build them. Just that I mourn the loss of openness, of mutuality. Not yours or mine, but ours.

Poetry is political — sometimes overtly, but mostly not. When it's not, it's still in the business of making the private public and the public private — that is, finding the deep private emotion inside its public utterance. If it's a good poem, we tend to want to share it. If it's read out loud, we look at each other when it's over and sigh, or go "Wow." We can't find the words to say what it means to us, but since we've experienced it with others, we don't really have to. If we've read it alone, we just say to our friend, "You have to read this poem."

"Home Town Park" is by my friend Sam Green, who's the former poet laureate of the state of Washington. Sam has had 10 collections of his own poems published, is a former college professor who lives way the heck out on Waldron, a 4 1/2-square-mile island with no public electricity or running water. He and his wife, Sally, have a log cabin they built themselves where they run a small publishing company called Brooding Heron Press. They publish well-known and less well-known poets using an old-fashioned letterpress. Besides writing poems, bookbinding is his passion. Their lives seem to me a happy combination of public and private.

As does his poem. Sam simply places himself in the park, where all actions could be ours, and are ours, since we come along as we read the poem. I especially love the dog who decides not to bark. The poet doesn't say the dog is silent. The poem calls up the bark and discards it. We know how it feels to decide not to act, to just settle down and watch the coming dark (which rhymes with bark in the poem). If we, like the dog, sit still long enough, says the poem, we can learn something about why we've come, why we're here.

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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