Poetry Friday: Birthday Gifts Edition

I got two poetic gifts for my birthday this year. 

With gift money I bought Lisel Mueller's book Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. Mueller, who died last year, emigrated to the United States with her family when she was 15, fleeing the Nazis. I haven't finished reading her book yet, but so far I am finding it wonderful, exactly as I expected from reading the poems of hers on the Poetry Foundation website. (Here's a post I wrote about her poetry on Poetry Friday in 2019.)

Here's a little sample, from the poem "Imaginary Paintings." One of the stanzas is called "How I Would Paint Happiness," and she writes:

Something sudden, a windfall,

a meteor shower. No --

a flowering tree releasing

all its blossoms at once,

and the one standing beneath it

unexpectedly robed in bloom, 

transformed into a stranger 

too beautiful to touch.

(Isn't that title, "Imaginary Paintings," a great one? Wouldn't you like to try that as a prompt?)

On the morning of my birthday, I woke to a Kindle book in my inbox from my daughter. It's called World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and it came out last year. This book is in prose, but Nezhukumatathil is a poet; I've shared her work before on Poetry Friday here, here, and here, and a few other places. Here are couple of little snippets from the first essay in the book, "Firefly."

 

"I grew up near scientists who worked with indigo buntings. There is no other blue like that of these birds, no feather more electric. They navigate by following the North Star, and these scientists were trying to trick them into following a false star in a darkened room. But most of these buntings don't fall for the ruse. When released, they find their way home the same as always. The buntings know the North Star by heart, learn to look for it in their first summer of life, storing this knowledge to use years later when they first learn to migrate. How they must have spent hours gazing at the star during those nestling nights, peeking out from under their mother. What shines so strong holds them steady."

 

"I know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little bit more each year. I can't help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say, I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here, I am, you are, over and over again. Perhaps I can will it to be true. Perhaps I can keep those summer nights with my family inside an empty jam jar, with holes poked in the lid, a twig and a few strands of grass tucked inside. And for those unimaginable nights in the future, when I know I'll miss my mother the most, I will let that jar's sweet glow serve as a night-light to cool and cut the air for me."  

My birthday always makes me feel a bit like a flowering tree released all its blossoms on my head, to use Mueller's words, and I'm going to try to carry that feeling into the year, like Nezhukumatathil's indigo buntings do with the light of the North Star. Happy Poetry Friday!

Kat Apel is mustering the poetry today here; go check it out!