FINDING A POEM
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one said that it sounded a little like an imitation of my earlier poems
about my daughter. And, when I came back to it, I had to admit that
I still didn't know what it was about. I could see that the image of
hacking the limbs off the trees was related to my separation from my
daughter (I had previously described this as an animal gnawing off
one of its limbs to get out of a trap) ; the pigeon fluttering out of my
hands was related both to my letting her go in the separation and also
to the way she sometimes ran away to make me chase her. The black–
bird in the last stanza seemed to be my first wife "protecting" her nest;
the killdeers crying over their flooded nests implied some sense of grief
over the breaking up of the home. These things all made sense and
were all memories which the child's return might cause to be reborn
in me. But this did not seem enough. No adequate pattern had emerged.
I wasn't sorry to have written the poem, but I couldn't say that I
thought much had happened.
Besides, what was the Fourth of July (stanza 3) doing in my
Easter poem? Of course there
had
been a terrible windstorm that night
in Iowa City. Many wires and trees came down, the power failed, and
all the people watching fireworks in the park barely escaped when the
storm passed ten feet over their heads. I knew that my daughter had
been in the park with her mother that night, though I was not. At that
time I was separated from the family; that particular evening I was
at a birthday party for the girl who later became my second wife.
Thus, that night had held a good deal of significance for me. Yet none
of it was
in
the poem, nor did it seem to me that it
should
be. While
I was writing this stanza, most of these problems had already occurred
to me, yet something had wanted to keep that phrase about the Fourth
of July. I had a moment of wild panic at the thought that perhaps I
was becoming patriotic in myoId age. Happily, I was soon able to
quell
that
chimera. Yet, I still had my dilemma: if the Fourth of July
didn't mean patriotism, what
did
it mean?
At this point, I put the poem aside, hoping that something might
happen
if
I looked the other way. One Sunday morning several weeks
later, I was sitting in a Quaker meeting when one of the members said
something that annoyed me. In rough paraphrase, it went, "The meas–
ure of man's freedom is that he alone is given the power to reject
God." I am always bothered by people, especially Quakers, who talk
about
God-I
started going to meeting to escape people who talk
about things they don't know about. My own habit is to paraphrase
such statements, substituting for the term
"God"
either "Nature" or
"Life," since those are at least terms about which I think a person
