A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

This coming Sunday, April 6th at two o’clock – to celebrate The New York Botanical Garden’s seasonal exhibit, The Orchid Show: Key West Contemporary – three distinguished contemporary poets, Henri Cole, David Yezzi, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy K.Smith will read the work of great American poets who made their home in Key West at different points in the 20th Century: Elizabeth Bishop in the 1940s, Richard Wilbur in the 1960s, and James Merrill in the 1980s. The reading will be in Ross Hall. The address is Bronx-River Parkway at Fordham Road, 2900 Southern Boulevard. The poems – as those we’ll post today and over the weekend demonstrate – are exquisite. For more details, see the Poetry Society of America’s event page here.

“April 5, 1974” by Richard Wilbur:

The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream.
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.