Goodbye to July Picnic

[jjhunter]

Sunday, every Sunday, let's have a community picnic. It's probably been a long week, and it's lovely to have a few minutes to sit back and relax and enjoy some good conversation in a less formal space. Feel free to bring something for the Picnic Basket - a poem you liked this week, a thought you had or something you experienced, or even something completely unrelated to poetry whatsoever that you just feel like sharing. Just take a moment to say hello, and maybe have a bite to eat; no one is going anywhere fast, and the shade promises some relief from the everyday heat. Let’s get to know each other a bit better, here under the branches of the poet’s tree.

Comments

[spiralsheep]

The poem A Calendar of Hares by Anna Crowe pleased me recently. I like poem sequences and I found this oblique seasonal round very satisfying.

Full poem: http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/calendar-hares

A Calendar of Hares (extract, the first half: 6/12)

1. At the raw end of winter
the mountain is half snow, half
dun grass. Only when snow
moves does it become a hare.

2. If you can catch a hare
and look into its eye
you will see the whole world.

3. That day in March
watching two hares boxing
at the field's edge, she felt
the child quicken.

4. It is certain Midas never saw a hare
or he would not have lusted after gold.

5. When the buzzard wheels
like a slow kite overhead
the hare pays out the string.

6. The man who tells you
he has thought of everything
has forgotten the hare.

[zirconium]

What a fascinating poem. I'm especially intrigued by #4.

I'm reminded of a favorite poem that mentions hares -- Czeslaw Milosz's "Encounter": http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Encounter.html

[spiralsheep]

Yes, about 4. It comes out of nowhere but it also comes out of thousands of years of poetic tradition, and it seems to fit although I feel as if it shouldn't. Also: silver hare/Midas' gold.

Oh, I love Encounter! I don't remember reading it before, although it's one of those poems that makes me feel as if I've always known it. Thank you for the link! It reminds me of the Kentish nobleman's image in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Book II, Chapter 13):

Life is like a banquet hall. Inside is light and fire and warmth and feasting, but outside it is cold and dark. A sparrow flies in through a window at one end, flies the length of the hall, and out through a window at the other end. That is what life is like. At birth we emerge from the unknown, and for a brief while we are here on this earth, with a fair amount of comfort and happiness. But then we fly out the window at the other end, into the cold and dark and unknown future.

Hares and birds, it seems, are persistent symbols of mystery in human minds.