Song for May

'I refuse to be numbed when there is so much invitation everywhere.'

‘For there is a language of flowers.
For there is a sound resounding upon all flowers.
For elegant phrases are nothing but flowers.’
—Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno

‘The pink lances of the horse chestnut’. Photo by Alina Matveycheva.

Dear reader,

There is a sensuality to May. It ripples, it surges, it is drenched in the scents of life that is urgent to live. Birdsong, flower song, lamb-in-the-field song.

Plenty for a romantic poet to write about. And I have offered you my own song for May below. Yet part of me wants to flinch from poems like this.

Flowers, really? Says the voice within. Life is too sharp. And haven’t you seen the news?

I’ve seen it. We shouldn’t ignore it; we should help in the ways we can, in which we are moved to; but neither should we luxuriate in it; neither should we let it become us. You can’t be informed if you’re drowning in information, especially if that information is designed to distract rather than enlighten.

Besides, what about everything else that’s going on in the world? What about the un-newsworthy?

To be well-informed isn’t merely to know what’s happening in government, but also what’s happening in the gardens, in the woods, in the ground. It is to know how so much has become lush with green; it is to know that the music of the chaffinch is moving through the trees.

The clematis will make no headlines, yet it blooms nonetheless, and deserves our attention, our comment.

I refuse to be numbed when there is so much invitation everywhere.

Flowers. Really.

Naive? Call it what you will. But should we not remind ourselves what it is we’re fighting for? If we are to overcome evil with good, then I want to fill myself with what is good.

Be dismayed, but do not despair. As Wendell Berry put it, ‘Be joyful, though you have considered the facts.’ Be aware of the hardness of the world, but do not let it harden you—let it soften you. Let the sharpness open you up. Read and write poems about what is beautiful, even if so much seems terrible. Do it because so much seems terrible.

Song for May

I was dead in the night. It is easy
so very easy for your living
to be collapsed by life.
But here, here in this slow suddenly growing awake
I am tired of then.
May is full of mornings, and I have come out
from the walls, and I have discovered
that my skin is not so resistant
to the blue invitation of sky
or the silken fingers of the breeze.

What is this greening spell
being cast over me?
Once I was afraid of God
but now I cannot help being drawn
towards the laughter drifting from the trees.
You feel that the flowers have to mean something—
that the streams and the hills
and the songs of the dawn
aren’t there for nothing.
The grasses, the roses,
the pink lances of the horse chestnuts
so clearly involved, so obviously immediate.

Such presence won’t be here for long;
neither will the inevitable absence.
And you, whose body will not outlast
the always coming and going of this music,
will you stop what you’re doing? Will you remember
then forget you’re going to die?
Will you go out into it?

©Gideon Heugh

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