Cutting through the smooth
morning lake surface they end
the day’s reflection.

On Memorial Day we’re supposed to recall the people in battle who suffer and fall. Corollary we insist that human descent, from the plains of Versailles to the rivers of Ghent, is all for the best. Now I won’t sing that bombing has no good effect (if you ignore the lives and the cities all wrecked) but I also won’t crank up the anthem refrain that no death is in vain, no death is in vain! Today, as we rest, we forget the rest. In parades we fete gross, not net.

In other respects our remembrance is skewed; while we swear that from now we’ll never be rude to detainees who will not be moved to a trial. Now we’ll put aside torture and ask with a smile. That’s what we were told in the years gone behind; we might ask what prevents waterboarding rewind when it’s all kept a secret and boxed in the dark. When memories dredged up are uncomfortably stark, we look forward, not back. The future is soothingly bare. And if we don’t look at our Schrodinger’s past, is it there?

I was planting foxgloves near the foundation of my house this morning. It’s an old foundation, made of blocks of sedimentary rock. Every time I work near it, I think of old things, lost and forgotten things.

So it was that my mind turned to foxglove secrets. Foxgloves are fancied as faerie flowers, herbs that have some connection to the mysterious wee folk of British gardens. They’re poisonous plants as well, being the source of the medicine digitalis, which in large doses can kill. As I dug, my mind started wandering to the idea that devoted gardeners of foxgloves might have secrets - at the very least, secrets for planting foxgloves.

So, I searched for the phrase foxglove secrets, and here’s what I found:

- Over at GardenWeb, a reader asks for secrets for growing foxgloves, and only gets the one real response, that the plants are biennials and self-seeding.
- Fox 4 Flowers offers some more information about foxgloves, including the etymylogical tip that the name foxgloves doesn’t have anything to do with foxes, but is an adaptation of the original name for the flowers: folk’s gloves, referring to the idea that faeries might wear the flowers on their fingers.
- Helen Burke, in her poem Foxgloves, writes that:

I keep some foxgloves in my secret cupboard.
They are as innocent as snow, sweet purple snow,
they can put a spell on you.
But do not fear them… they show you a simple face.

Spells sound secret enough, and what about that secret cupboard? Is it a suicide cupboard? There are easier ways to go than the heart contractions brought on by digitalis, surely.

How is purple snow innocent? If I see snow that’s purple, I don’t think of it as innocent, or sweet, unless it’s in a snowcone. Is Burke talking about going to a carnival?

I also want to know, if snow is innocent, what it is innocent of. Has snow been accused of a crime that it did not commit? And what about rain? Is Burke suggesting that rain is guilty of something?

I think I’m going to use this line the next time it rains, as people are preparing their umbrellas: This rain looks guilty to me.

The indiscretions of the rain may be the closest I get to foxglove secrets today.

I wrote earlier today about anti-weapons protests taking place in the United Kingdom, but there are other protests going on in Britain as well.

Every year at about this time, Christian preachers take to their pulpits and start to complain about how their religion isn’t taken seriously. This year, in Wales, the complaints have been taken to the streets. Stephen Green of a group called Christian Voice climbed a step ladder outside the Welsh Assembly and told a group of people there, “We’re seeing the Christian faith attacked on all sides. Now it’s under attack in a seat of government in the UK!”

What was this “attack” against Christianity? Was it a drive-by-shooting? A bombing? A riot? An act of vandalism? Nope. It was poetry. The group was protesting an “attack” in the form of a poem written by Patrick Jones.

Some Brits were protesting against attacks that kill and maim people, using weapons made by arms merchants like Raytheon, but Christian Voice did not take part in those protests. The group chose to protest against attacks of poetry instead.

Hm… and why do you think some people don’t take Christianity seriously any more?

From The American Center for Sarah Palin Inspirational Limericks:

As debates go, it was quite a flat one,
each answer most likely a pat one.
Though a night with no drama
is a win for Obama
the same can’t be said for Mc “That One.”

Can you type out some doggerel verse
To explain the McCain universe?
Post a comment right quick
With your own Limerick
Next to Palin you couldn’t do worse

Fear the lesser son
who, desperate to burn bright,
incinerates all.

- Susan Anthony, San Francisco, Poets Against War

Muthee won her the office of Guv
Praying hands brought down might from Above
But Muthee has itches
Hunting ones he calls witches
Fitting Palin like hand in a glove.

To see the graceful
design of his child’s stumbles
marks true father’s pride.

Paranthropus appeared in his remains
a southern man robust in cheek and jaw
who gathered nourishment from nature’s grains
and picking leaves and nuts then ate them raw.

Survival of the savory, cusp to root,
the strong nutcracker man was just a fruit.

Read the rest of the story of the soft hard man from Stony Brook.

April was National Poetry Month, which is why I have waited until today to place this sonnet online. After all, the category under which this is placed is called irregular verse, and a sonnet is anything but irregular. I am substituting irregularity in timing for irregularity in form.

A house to die in is the truest kind,
the owner’s spirit sheltered in its heart,
with every passage and chamber designed
to keep the beat of which he is a part.

a shade of what its owner once supposed,
a haunting mem’ry of a home foreclosed.

Prairie Home Companion, the radio home of writerly sighing for a country still full of at-home folks who listen to bluegrass in their spare time, is sponsoring a sonnet contest.

Send them a sonnet by midnight tomorrow night, and the staff of Prairie Home Companion will read your sonnet, and if it’s good enough, arrange for it to be read on the air. If yours is the very best sonnet of all, you will win a Sleep Number bed.

Does it seem odd to write a sonnet for a bed? William Shakespeare wrote sonnets, and probably earned money from them somehow, with which he may have bought bread, or a hat, or candles, or a prostitute. It seems more poetic to buy bread, a prostitute, or even a hat from the the proceeds of a poem than a bed. Yet, Prairie Home Companion is sponsored by the Sleep Number bed company, so that’s what they have to offer.

What do you have to offer? Would you offer your sonnet for the chance at a bed? That’s really what you’ll be offering your sonnet for - not a bed, but for the chance to get a bed. The rules of the Prairie Home Companion sonnet contest state: “All entries become the property of Prairie Home Productions and American Public Media and may be read on the air or published in print or electronic form.”

Giving up a poem, especially one so challenging in form as a sonnet, seems more artistic when it is done merely for the chance to have a bed to sleep on, because it suggests the likelihood that most people who enter the contest will surrender their sonnets and not get any bed to sleep on at all, or even a nice letter from Garrison Keillor, or even one of his interns, with a fake signature.

Would you write a sonnet, and then give up ownership of it to a radio show, never to be read on the air, or by anybody else at all, other than your mother perhaps, for the mere hope that you might get a new bed?

If so, what would you choose for the subject of your sonnet?

The call came from Osama, to wit
We must stop cartooning his prophet
We must halt our free speeches
Or he’ll bomb us on beaches
Will we heed the command of a git?

Now come on! Write your own piece of verse
On the news from our grand universe
It’s important to share
We really won’t care
If your try is for better or worse

Starlight sends us this Bush Haiku tonight:

Anachronism,
Bush is too long from age old
To burn as Voice God

Proposal: Search terms are the short-form poetry of our age.

Discuss amongst yourselves.