'It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…'” -from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Thanks to my lovely brother Gabriel Foulc who helped with shooting and editing this beautiful video, I get to share to you something that was fun to curate and create.
I miss my acting days, where I used to play in a few amateur plays and short films. Somehow I needed to bring ‘performance’ back into my life, and reading poetry was the closest ‘easy fix’ I could find to fill that lack.
Thanks again to my brother — PS: you should check out his channel, La Cocina Studios, where you can find his One Afternoon Series; the concept: featuring one artist per video he and team get to spend one afternoon with, where the artists talk about their craft and art, their philosophy, and their day to day. I find this amazing for anybody who wants to live a more artistic life or is an artist, curious to see how others live through their art, by their art, or with their art.
As mentioned in the video, I’m compiling the poems in this post in written form.
Here are the featured poems in order:
01:31- A History of Weather by Billy Collins 03:37 - The Silver Lily by Louise Glück 05:03 - Water by Alex Dimitrov 07:12 - When Spring Arrives by Fernando Pessoa 09:48 - Spring by Edna St Vincent Millay 10:48 - New England Spring, 1942 by Edna St Vincent Millay 13:15 - Spring People by Audre Lorde 14:10 - Anniversary by Audre Lorde 14:59 - Second Spring by Audre Lorde 16:27- Spring by William Blake 18:23 - Trilliums by Mary Oliver 19:31 - Two Kinds of Deliverance by Mary Oliver 21:28 - Spring by Mary Oliver
Alex Dimitrov has a substack and writes for AstroPoets and his own Substack Alex Dimitrov
Two Kinds of Deliverance by Mary Oliver
1
Last night the geese came back,
slanting fast
from the blossom of the rising moon down
to the black pond. A muskrat
swimming in the twilight saw them and hurried
to the secret lodges to tell everyone
spring had come.
And so it had.
By morning when I went out
the last of the ice had disappeared, blackbirds
sang on the shores. Every year
the geese, returning,
do this, I don’t
know how.
2
The curtains opened and there was
an old man in a headdress of feathers,
leather leggings and a vest made
from the skin of some animal. He danced
in a kind of surly rapture, and the trees
in the fields far away
began to mutter and suck up their long roots.
Slowly they advanced until they stood
pressed to the schoolhouse windows.
3
I don’t know
lots of things but I know this: next year
when spring
flows over the starting point I’ll think I’m going to
drown in the shimmering miles of it and then
one or two birds will fly me over
the threshold.
As for the pain
of others, of course it tries to be
abstract, but then
there flares up out of a vanished wilderness, like fire,
still blistering: the wrinkled face
of an old Chippewa
smiling, hating us,
dancing for his life.
TRILLIUMS
Every spring
among
the ambiguities
of childhood
the hillsides grew white
with the wild trilliums.
I believed in the world.
Oh, I wanted
to be easy
in the peopled kingdoms,
to take my place there,
but there was none
that I could find
shaped like me.
So I entered
through the tender buds,
I crossed the cold creek,
my backbone
and my thin white shoulders
unfolding and stretching.
From the time of snow-melt,
when the creek roared
and the mud slid
and the seeds cracked,
I listened to the earth-talk.
the root-wrangle,
the arguments of energy,
the dreams lying
just under the surface,
the rising,
becoming
at the last moment
flaring and luminous -
the patient parable
of every spring and hillside
year after difficult year.
—
SPRING
All day the flicker
has anticipated
the lust of the season, by
shouting. He scouts up
the tree and at
a certain place begins
to cry out. My, in his
black-freckled vest, bay body with
red trim and sudden chrome
underwings, he is dapper. Of course somebody
listening nearby
hears him; she answers
with a sound like hysterical
laughter, and rushers out into
the field where he is poised
an old phone pole, his head
swinging, his wings
opening and shutting in a kind of
butterfly stroke. She can't
resist; they touch; they flutter.
How lightly, altogether, they accept
the great task, of carrying life
forward! In the crown of an oak
they choose a small tree-cave
which they enter with sudden quietness
and modesty. And, for a while,
the wind that can be
a knife or a hammer, subsides,
They listen
to the thrushes,
The sky is blue, or the rain
falls with its spills of pearl.
Around their wreath of darkness
the leaves of the world unfurl.