A Deep River Year
April 30,  2014

There is no green like the green of  a late April day.   Today a line of willows shines in the afternoon light, a neon green with golden highlights.   It is what I call Easter green, and it is also erupting in the tiny flowers on a thousand maple trees and in the new foliage on the lilacs waving in the breeze next to the barn.  And on the hillside, close to the ground beneath the canopy of trees, that same bright green makes even the hated Japanese barberry look beautiful.   Amid this profusion of green, the bright yellow blooms of forsythia and daffodils and the deep purple of periwinkle and the profusion of violets in the meadow add to the breathtaking loveliness of these days.    Even when it rains, the earth seems to smile.

Tomorrow is May Day.  For millennia this was a day to celebrate the return of life, and it was marked by a variety of celebrations that may or may not have been fertility rites.   My grandmother recalled a tradition of her youth, when young people would gather flowers into  May baskets, often made out of paper cones, then leave them on the doorstep of a beloved, bang on the door or ring the bell and run like the wind.   If you were caught, it was forever.   And then there was the ritual of a Maypole, to which long ribbons were attached.   As I recall it, the point was that each young man took a ribbon and danced one direction, and the ladies went the other way, weaving in and out until the ribbons were all wound tight against the pole.   In the end you could wind up face to face with your one true love!  

One of the treasured pictures of my father's childhood has him amid a group of friends, a tall Maypole in the background.   He sits in the front row, finger up his nose.  Romance apparently was not on his mind.   Freud thought the Maypole was a phallic symbol; others weren't so sure.   One idea was that the Maypole represented the "axis mundi," or the center axis of the world.  And why not.   We spin on this terrestrial ball, and at the center of everything is love's renewing power.   More recently May Day has been observed as International Workers' Day, and during the cold war years it was marked by parades of tanks and soldiers.  I, for one, prefer the old version of the celebration.   I like romance better than tanks.  Yesterday I bent down to find a walnut amid the remnant of last fall's leaves, broken in two.   Inside, a heart smiled.   Happy May Day!

May Day

Sweet day,
 gowned in green and gold,
 you call us to dance with you
 to an oriole's tune.
 It is time for joy,
 as ribbons of clouds fly
 from the passing rain,
 and the earth sings, sprouts,
 rises true as a promise.
 The living has been hard too long,
 hard as a bitter hermit
 red in hand from the cold
 which gives no kindness.
 And so the weary laborer,
 who bends away from wind,
 trusts no generous invitation
 for fear that all true goods
 are finally false, and thus lives wretched
 in a wounded world.
 But some, instead, leave flowers at the door,
 run to dance to the orioles' tune,
 astonished at the secret
 hidden in the hollow of this May day.
 Here is a walnut split, like the atoms of everything,
 showing a heart,
 and can it be that all is held together,
 sings, sprouts, rises
 out of love?

--Timothy Haut, April 30,  2014