A Knocker

(The Library by Jacob Lawrence, 1917-2000, American
painter)

“Friends can most of all be what they want to be, and what they are called to be, exactly when they are members of a broader flourishing community,” writes John Cuddeback in True Friendship: Where Virtue Becomes Happiness. “The Greeks had a wonderful insight. The height of human greatness is the greatness of a community, a community whose backbone is friendship.”

A KNOCKER

There are those who grow
gardens in their heads
paths lead from their hair
to sunny and white cities

it’s easy for them to write
they close their eyes
immediately schools of images
stream down from their foreheads

my imagination
is a piece of board
my sole instrument
is a wooden stick

I strike the board
it answers me
yes — yes
no — no

for others the green bell of a tree
the blue bell of water
I have a knocker
from unprotected gardens

I thump on the board
and it prompts me
with the moralist’s dry poem
yes — yes
no — no

~ Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), Polish poet

Piano

(The Piano Lesson by Henri Matisse, 1869-1954,
French printmaker, painter, and sculptor)

Both the art and the poem today recreate a memory of a young boy at a piano — but with a different tempo and perspective.

Matisse’s painting is of his son Pierre’s practicing the piano to the beat of a metronome. It records the fleeting moment as the triangle of a shadow flashes across his face. This image anticipates a memory for the boy in the future.

Lawrence’s poem is of a scene from his boyhood of sitting under the piano listening to his mother’s playing and singing. This memory is made up of more than a brief moment; it blends together repeated Sunday evenings by the piano.

PIANO

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

~ D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist, poet, and literary critic

Mosquito

(Studies of Bees and Insects by Beatrix Potter,
1866-1943, English writer, illustrator, sheep breeder,
and conservationist, and creator of Peter Rabbit and
Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, among many others)

No thing is too small or theme too slight for a poet to tackle. John Donne wrote of a flea, John Keats of a grasshopper and cricket, and Don Marquis of archy the cockroach. And then there’s D. H. Lawrence’s challenge to the “Winged Victory,” that pesky bane of summer outdoor fun.

(The poet makes a small error of no consequence — it is the female of the species that does all the biting.)

MOSQUITO

When did you start your tricks,
Monsieur?

What do you stand on such high legs for?
Why this length of shredded shank,
You exaltation?

Is it so that you shall lift your center of gravity upwards
And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,
Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?

I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory
In sluggish Venice.
You turn your head towards your tail, and smile.

How can you put so much devilry
Into that translucent phantom shred
Of a frail corpus?

Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs,
How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air,
A nothingness.

Yet what an aura surrounds you;
Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind.
That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic:
Invisibility, and the anesthetic power
To deaden my attention in your direction.

But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.
Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air
In circles and evasions, enveloping me,
Ghoul on wings,
Winged Victory.

Settle, and stand on long thin shanks
Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,
You speck.

I hate the way you lurch off sideways into the air
Having read my thoughts against you.

Come then, let us play at unawares,
And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.
Man or mosquito.

You don’t know that I exist, and I don’t know that you exist.
Now then!

It is your trump
It is your hateful little trump
You pointed fiend,
Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you:
It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear.

Why do you do it?
Surely it is bad policy.
They say you can’t help it.

If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent.
But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan
A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp.

Blood, red blood
Super-magical
Forbidden liquor.

I behold you stand
For a second enspasmed in oblivion,
Obscenely ecstasied
Sucking live blood,
My blood.

Such silence, such suspended transport,
Such gorging,
Such obscenity of trespass.

You stagger
As well as you may.
Only your accursed hairy frailty
Your own imponderable weightlessness
Saves you, wafts you away on the very draft my anger makes in its snatching.

Away with a paean of derision
You winged blood-drop.
Can I not overtake you?
Are you one too many for me,
Winged Victory?
Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?

Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes
Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you!
Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!

~ D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist, poet, and literary critic

Of History and Hope

(from The Migration Series, No. 58, 1941 by Jacob
Lawrence, American painter, 1917-2000)

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America,” states the preamble to the Constitution.

OF HISTORY AND HOPE

We have memorized America

how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.

But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands — oh, rarely in a row —
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.

Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become —
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.

All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit — it isn’t there yet —
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

~ Miller Williams, born 1930, American poet and translator