Rite of Spring
![The Olympic Peninsula at the Vernal Equinox [2014]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/a_olympicpen.jpg "The Olympic Peninsula at the Vernal Equinox [2014]")
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
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A bird with whiskers. The cat will be jealous.
American human rite of spring, 1908 version (back when a gentleman caller was still a beau; the present anthem of the seventh-inning stretch began as a courtship song of sorts):
Katie Casey was baseball mad,
Had the fever and had it bad.
Just to root for the home town crew,
Ev’ry sou [cent]
Katie blew.
On a Saturday her young beau
Called to see if she’d like to go
To see a show, but Miss Kate said “No,
I’ll tell you what you can do”:
Chorus: Take me out to the ball game. . .
Katie Casey saw all the games,
Knew the players by their first names.
Told the umpire he was wrong,
All along,
Good and strong.
When the score was just two to two,
Katie Casey knew what to do,
Just to cheer up the boys she knew,
She made the gang sing this song:
Chorus: Take me out to the ball game. . .
And here is the Haydn Quartet version, which topped the Billboard chart for 16 weeks in 1908:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g0qS9L-fhY&ab_channel=warholsoup100
Woke up on this Daylight Savings Time morning to fresh snow on the ground.
Just enough powder on the porch to see the prints of the birds feet dancing back and forth looking for fallen seeds from the feeder.
My friends, who art in Florida and cursed be thy names, called last night to “warmly” describe the weather there.
Most days I’m good with winter in New England, some days (before the meds kick in) I feel like this…
https://onthenorthriver.com/2015/01/27/this-man-is-stupid/