by Allie Esiri
2 March • The Bright Field • R. S. Thomas
R. S. Thomas was another proudly Welsh poet. A clergyman for much of his life, his poems are often very spiritual in nature, and he frequently makes reference to Bible stories, as he does here with Moses and the burning bush. This poem is about how we live in the present moment. If life is not about the past or future, then it is about finding the right to look at the things directly in front of us, now.
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
2 March • March • Anon.
This traditional and simple rhyme hails originally from Northumberland. The strange word ‘yeans’ is from the local dialect, and means ‘gives birth to’. The month of March is here described as a time in which new life springs forth – lambs frolic and thorns bloom into roses – but also a period in which the wind can be bitter and strong enough to blow through to the core of an ox’s horn.
March yeans the lammie
And buds the thorn,
And blows through the flint
Of an ox’s horn.
3 March • Anger Against Beasts • Wendell Berry
Today is World Wildlife Day. In this short yet visceral poem, the prolific American writer, philosopher, environmental activist – and farmer – Wendell Berry laments the unnatural and senseless acts of violence which humans inflict on animals.
The hook of adrenalin shoves
into the blood. Man’s will,
long skilled to kill or have
its way, would drive the beast
against nature, transcend
the impossible in simple fury.
The blow falls like a dead seed.
It is defeat for beasts
do not pardon, but heal or die
in the absence of the past.
The blow survives in the man.
His triumph is a wound. Spent,
he must wait the slow
unalterable forgiveness of time.
3 March • Dear March – Come In • Emily Dickinson
This poem observes the paradox of the seasons: Emily Dickinson both praises and blames March for its beauty and its brevity.
Dear March – Come in –
How glad I am –
I hoped for you before –
Put down your Hat –
You must have walked –
How out of Breath you are –
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest –
Did you leave Nature well –
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me –
I have so much to tell –
I got your Letter, and the Birds –
The Maples never knew that you were coming – till I called
I declare – how Red their Faces grew –
But March, forgive me – and
All those Hills you left for me to Hue –
There was no Purple suitable –
You took it all with you –
Who knocks? That April –
Lock the Door –
I will not be pursued –
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied –
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come
That Blame is just as dear as Praise
And Praise as mere as Blame –
4 March • Holi • Chrissie Gittins
Holi is a Hindu festival that falls at this time of year. It is known as the ‘Festival of Colours’. To mark the triumph of good (spring) over evil (winter), festival-goers brightly colour one another with handfuls of paints and dyed water balloons. Chrissie Gittins’s poem imagines a language being made out of the colourful marks of the festival.
A splodge of purple on your neck
and you can feel the temperature rising.
A rub of brown on your cheek
and your friend is your friend for ever.
A cloud of red above your head
and your feet start itching to dance.
A scatter of yellow on your shirt
and your enemy is now your friend.
A blotch of blue on your nose
and the winter is soon forgotten.
A bucket of black down your back
and you are ready to beat the drum.
A stream of orange in the air
and your heart begins to surge.
A smear of pink on your forehead
and your misdeeds fade away.
A dusting of green on your eyelashes –
spring is surely on its way.
4 March • A Date with Spring • John Agard
This poem is a first-person monologue from the perspective of the tree itself, imagining the end of winter as a time where the tree prepares to get dressed ready for a ‘date’ with the new season – spring.
Got a date with spring
Got to look me best.
Of all the trees
I’ll be the smartest dressed.
Perfumed breeze
behind me ear.
Pollen accessories
all in place.
Raindrop moisturizer
for me face.
Sunlight tints
to spruce up the hair.
What’s the good of being a tree
if you can’t flaunt your beauty?
Winter, I was naked
Exposed as can be.
Me wardrobe took off
with the wind.
Life was a frosty slumber.
Now, spring, here I come.
Can’t wait to slip in
to me little green number.
5 March • The River in March • Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes was one of the greatest British poets of the twentieth century, and was Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998. He is mainly known for his nature poetry, often in deceptively plain language, and his poems show a great respect for the natural world.
Now the river is rich, but her voice is low.
It is her Mighty Majesty the sea
Travelling among the villages incognito.
Now the river is poor. No song, just a thin mad whisper.
The winter floods have ruined her.
She squats between draggled banks, fingering her rags and rubbish.
And now the river is rich. A deep choir.
It is the lofty clouds, that work in heaven,
Going on their holiday to the sea.
The river is poor again. All her bones are showing.
Through a dry wig of bleached flotsam she peers up ashamed
From her slum of sticks.
Now the river is rich, collecting shawls and minerals.
Rain brought fatness, but she takes ninety-nine percent
Leaving the fields just one percent to survive on.
And now she is poor. Now she is East wind sick.
She huddles in holes and corners. The brassy sun gives her a headache.
She has lost all her fish. And she shivers.
But now once more she is rich. She is viewing her lands.
A hoard of king-cups spills from her folds, it blazes, it cannot be hidden.
A salmon, a sow of solid silver,
Bulges to glimpse it.
5 March • Spring • Gerard Manley Hopkins
This sonnet begins by describing the beautiful qualities of spring, before comparing it to the garde
n of Eden.
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
6 March • Young Lambs • John Clare
We measure the seasons through a cycle of events. With the approach of spring, the season of new life, we see the arrival of young farmyard animals. John Clare celebrates the coming season with the lightness of his rhymes in this poem about lambs. Even in relating this jubilant display of life, however, Clare’s poem seems drawn to the dark imagery of death.
The spring is coming by a many signs;
The trays are up, the hedges broken down,
That fenced the haystack, and the remnant shines
Like some old antique fragment weathered brown.
And where suns peep, in every sheltered place,
The little early buttercups unfold
A glittering star or two – till many trace
The edges of the blackthorn clumps in gold.
And then a little lamb bolts up behind
The hill and wags his tail to meet the yoe,
And then another, sheltered from the wind,
Lies all his length as dead – and lets me go
Close by and never stirs, but beaking lies,
With legs stretched out as though he could not rise.
6 March • To My Sister • William Wordsworth
Like Ted Hughes and John Clare, and an inspiration to them both, Wordsworth was a great poet of nature. And, like Hughes, he was also Poet Laureate. This poem is a celebration of taking the time to enjoy a beautiful day, away from work and responsibilities.
It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before,
The red-breast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.
There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.
My Sister! (’tis a wish of mine)
Now that our morning meal is done,
Make haste, your morning task resign;
Come forth and feel the sun.
Edward will come with you – and, pray,
Put on with speed your woodland dress,
And bring no book: for this one day
We’ll give to idleness.
No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living Calendar:
We from today, my friend, will date
The opening of the year.
Love, now an universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth –
It is the hour of feeling.
One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.
Some silent laws our hearts will make,
Which they shall long obey:
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from today.
And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above,
We’ll frame the measure of our souls:
They shall be tuned to love.
Then come, my sister! come, I pray,
With speed put on your woodland dress,
And bring no book: for this one day
We’ll give to idleness.
7 March • But These Things Also • Edward Thomas
Edward Thomas wrote this poem in 1915, and its message carries memories of the great losses that occurred in the winter of 1914 during the First World War.
But these things also are Spring’s—
On banks by the roadside the grass
Long-dead that is greyer now
Than all the Winter it was;
The shell of a little snail bleached
In the grass; chip of flint, and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds’ dung
In splashes of purest white:
All the white things a man mistakes
For earliest violets
Who seeks through Winter’s ruins
Something to pay Winter’s debts,
While the North blows, and starling flocks
By chattering on and on
Keep their spirits up in the mist,
And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.
7 March • The Sound Collector • Roger McGough
On 7 March 1876 the inventor Alexander Graham Bell patented an object which changed the human experience of sound and communication forever: the telephone. This poem by Roger McGough imagines everyday sounds as objects which might be put into a bag and carried away.
A stranger called this morning
Dressed all in black and grey
Put every sound into a bag
And carried them away
The whistling of the kettle
The turning of the lock
The purring of the kitten
The ticking of the clock
The popping of the toaster
The crunching of the flakes
When you spread the marmalade
The scraping noise it makes
The hissing of the frying pan
The ticking of the grill
The bubbling of the bathtub
As it starts to fill
The drumming of the raindrops
On the windowpane
When you do the washing-up
The gurgle of the drain
The crying of the baby
The squeaking of the chair
The swishing of the curtain
The creaking of the stair
A stranger called this morning
He didn’t leave his name
Left us only silence
Life will never be the same
8 March • Warning • Jenny Joseph
8 March is International Women’s Day, a celebration of the political, social and cultural achievements of women everywhere. The day exists as a symbol of the victories made so far in the struggle for gender equality, although its existence is also a sign that equality has not yet been gained. Jenny Joseph’s warm and comical poem makes fun of the rules that seem to govern being a woman in modern society, and it represents a quiet but important act of female defiance.
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.
But now w
e must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.
8 March • Phenomenal Woman • Maya Angelou
Here we have another great, rousing poem that celebrates womanhood in all its variety. Much like Jenny Joseph’s ‘Warning’, this piece encourages women to take pride in who they are, and to reject dated, restrictive societal expectations about how a woman should be. It is one of countless inspiring poems by Maya Angelou – the pioneering African American writer who was a tireless champion of civil rights, women’s rights, and by all accounts, a ‘phenomenal woman’ herself.
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.