December
Poems from Rivard Street
by Benjamin Oldham
"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."—William Faulkner, 1949 Nobel Prize Banquet Speech
Sleeping Minds
Sleeping minds lie
like boulders
in an old forest.
They are bold
to lie among the living
undisturbed by growth,
and bolder still
to lie to us outright
with thoughts
we call our own
the weighted steps
have only planted at our feet.
Who can trust a mind
of boulder fields?
And who can move
the boulders out,
sweep away the glacial debris,
the many heavy tons?
But anyone walking
through an old forest
may notice how a tree
will split a boulder
in its way,
pressing overhead
and over time
until the boulder breaks
and lies there
with a wicked crack
in its former nature,
its two halves struck down
like twin parts of a mind
that, in order
to wake the other,
need to fall silently in a forest
with no one there to hear,
no one there
to put them back to sleep.
A Year of Yellow Septembers
Under the first snow,
all the worlds I know
have disappeared.
And buried with them too
are all the worlds
I never knew were possible,
as if the snow
has evened out the chances
of the things to come
when it is gone,
as if the spring
may not return
and what may come instead
is something like
a year of yellow Septembers.
Only when the world
has disappeared
before my eyes
do I begin to think so much
about what was
and what may be.
The same may go for me,
I think,
when I have disappeared
into the snow,
the kind that turns to water
on my cheek
and ice upon my nose—
the same may go for me,
the spring may step aside
to let me have
a year of yellow Septembers.