Years ago I heard Maxine Kumin at a poetry reading at Baylor University. When the program ended, I hurried out to the foyer where the poets had books for sale. Although I quickly made my choice, Kuman was already gone when I returned to the auditorium. I did not get her autograph, but I did get her book of poetry to remind me of the afternoon.
Maxine Kumin (1925-2014) is not a poet of pretty things. She wrote about life as her keen eyes observed it, as the wife of an engineering consultant, the mother of 3 children, and a breeder of Arabian and quarter horses on their New Hampshire farm the last 39 years of her life. Nature is both beautiful and brutal, and she saw both sides. This week I share both a poem written for children and a poem for adults that I think many of you will appreciate, so keep scrolling after you read the children's poem.
I chose this particular Kumin poem for children because Isaac Werner loved birds. He kept track of the seasons by their arrivals and departures, and he fed prairie chickens and quail with no intention of ever hunting them. In the hard times of the late 1800s he was very angry when a neighbor drove around his claims shooting his half-tame birds, and he posted "No Hunting" signs around the two claims. In the years just prior to Isaac's death, the Kansas legislature passed laws against hunting certain birds, but some had already been hunted to near extinction.
In her poem, notice how Kumin delivers her lesson without lecturing!
I chose this particular Kumin poem for children because Isaac Werner loved birds. He kept track of the seasons by their arrivals and departures, and he fed prairie chickens and quail with no intention of ever hunting them. In the hard times of the late 1800s he was very angry when a neighbor drove around his claims shooting his half-tame birds, and he posted "No Hunting" signs around the two claims. In the years just prior to Isaac's death, the Kansas legislature passed laws against hunting certain birds, but some had already been hunted to near extinction.
In her poem, notice how Kumin delivers her lesson without lecturing!
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Photo credit: Pookie Fugglestein
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by Maxine Kumin
Said a lightening bug to a firefly,
"Look at the lightening bugs fly by!"
"Silly dunce!" said the fly. "What bug ever flew?"
Those are fireflies. And so are you."
"Bug!" cried the bug. "Fly!" cried the fly.
"Wait!" said a glowworm happening by.
"I'm a worm," squirmed the worm. "I glimmer all night."
You are worms, both of you. I know I'm right."
"Fly!" cried the fly. "Worm!" cried the worm.
"Bug!" cried the bug. "I'm standing firm."
Back and forth through the dark each shouted his word
Till their quarrel awakened the early bird.
"You three noisy things, you are all related,"
She said to the worm, and promptly ate it.
With a snap of her bill she finished the fly,
And the lightening bug was the last to die.
All glowers and glimmerers, there's a MORAL:
Shine if you must, but do not quarrel.
On face book, many people post remembrances of the anniversary of the passing of those they love, and because I have noticed this tradition, I have chosen Maxim's poem The Envelope to share. Isaac, too, posted notices of the death of his sister and his uncle in his journal, sharing with no one his personal loss but documenting it in his own private way.
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| Original Matryoshka set of Stacking Dolls, 1892 |
The Envelope
by Maxine Kumin
...I fear to cease, even knowing that at the hour
of my death my daughters will absorb me, even
knowing they will carry me about forever
inside them, an arrested fetus, even as I carry
the ghost of my mother under my navel, a nervy
little androgynous person, a miracle
folded in lotus position.
Like those old pear-shaped Russian dolls that open
at the middle to reveal another and another, down
to the pea-sized irreducible minimum,
may we carry our mothers forth in our bellies.
May we, borne onward by our daughters, ride
in the Envelope of Almost-Infinity,
that chain letter good for the next twenty-five
thousand days of their lives.
When we travelled to Russia decades ago, we brought home our own set of stacking dolls, as most visitors to Russia did at that time. Perhaps because I am a daughter who so much resembles her mother, I was struck by the imagery chosen by Kumin to describe how not only the genetic appearance but also the habits, beliefs, and traditions of mothers pass through generations--some good and some not so good. Their memories, from their own mothers and generations before, pass to us, and while the more common imagery refers to our hearts and minds, Kumin's imagery of the stacking dolls, each retaining what came before her, seems apt, more beautiful than the genetic charts we moderns use to trace ancestry.
To those of you who replied to my call from an earlier blog to share your own inherited habits of a leftover-jar in the refrigerator for later stews and soups, and of saving plastic containers because they are too good to throw away (although you already have too many to ever use all of them), I loved hearing from each of you. Maybe it's that "little androgynous person" we carry inside us like a stacking doll that makes it impossible to break those habits learned from our mothers!
To those of you who replied to my call from an earlier blog to share your own inherited habits of a leftover-jar in the refrigerator for later stews and soups, and of saving plastic containers because they are too good to throw away (although you already have too many to ever use all of them), I loved hearing from each of you. Maybe it's that "little androgynous person" we carry inside us like a stacking doll that makes it impossible to break those habits learned from our mothers!
2 comments:
Wonderful poetry. The one about the Mothers inside us reminded me of The Rankin Family's "We Rise Again" in the faces of our children. https://youtu.be/42F12OUTkIo
Thank you so much for your comment. I was not familiar with the Rankin Family, so I looked up the lyrics and love them!
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