Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

“Now is the month of maying” says the old song by Thomas Morley. Our month of maying is drawing to a close, but we have explored far more than spring romance.

Many of these end-of-May poets have taken darker turns, some because of illness or alcohol. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson seems darker in his poetry than his essays.

So we must look a littler harder for the gleams of light.

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May 24

• Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) was born in Leningrad, and exiled from the Soviet Union as a dissident.

Transatlantic

The last twenty years were good for practically everybody
save the dead. But maybe for them as well.
Maybe the Almighty Himself has turned a bit bourgeois
and uses a credit card. For otherwise time’s passage
makes no sense. Hence memories, recollections,
values, deportment. One hopes one hasn’t
spent one’s mother or father or both, or a handful of friends entirely
as they cease to hound one’s dreams. One’s dreams,
unlike the city, become less populous
the older one gets. That’s why the eternal rest
cancels analysis. The last twenty years were good
for practically everybody and constituted
the afterlife for the dead. Its quality could be questioned
but not its duration. The dead, one assumes, would not
mind attaining a homeless status, and sleep in archways
or watch pregnant submarines returning
to their native pen after a worldwide journey
without destroying life on earth, without
even a proper flag to hoist.

– 1992

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