Response: A Poem for Friday
I can’t honestly say why I like New Zealand poet Mary Ursula Bethell’s poem “Response” so much. I think it just feels like a post-Easter, spring-is-in-the air kind of poem. Except it’s more than that, too. Because it’s not just that spring is in the air – at least for the one living in the northern hemisphere with whom the poet corresponds – it’s also that spring (and all the seasons) are so fleeting; they are here to be savored today but will be gone soon enough and we will only have our fond recollections. Which of course is the way of all life, as we watch our children grow, or our parents age, or assess what we have done with our life. Memory, it seems, is all we have, which makes us such fragile beings. And yet even when memory falters or fails, there is still the moment, the solitary moment in which we live that we can treasure, and share, and give thanks for.
Have a great weekend, filled, I hope, with a few very present moments.
Response
When you wrote your letter it was April,
And you were glad that it was spring weather,
And that the sun shone out in turn with showers of rain.
I write in waning May and it is autumn,
And I am glad that my chrysanthemums
Are tied up fast to strong posts,
So that the south winds cannot beat them down.
I am glad that they are tawny coloured,
And fiery in the low west evening light.
And I am glad that one bush warbler
Still sings in the honey-scented wattle…
But oh, we have remembering hearts,
And we say ‘How green it was in such and such an April,’
And ‘Such and such an autumn was very golden,’
And ‘Everything is for a very short time.’
Mary Ursula Bethell
Edward Hirsch says that poetry comes a long way to find us. A poem that we respond to is a gift. And sometimes we just have to say thank you and not worry about why.
This poem was an amazing present first to you and then from you to me. Thank you.
i love her peoms , this one is my favorate. I am Chinese new zealander