2 Poems
Another Sabbath
Though Friday is the holy day of the week
For Muslims, Saturday for Jews,
Sunday for Christians, I know more
Than a few believers who consider Monday
The day of faith, including my friend Maria,
An English teacher at Kenmore High.
Who, when she wakes on Monday
To look over the poems she assigned on Friday,
Finds them at first inscrutable.
It's not a case of their seeming unfamiliar,
As if she's never read them before,
But of finding the print somehow illegible,
As if the pages had been left in the rain all weekend,
Or as if they'd just been found in a jar
That lay crumbling in a cave for centuries,
Lines in a language she hasn't studied,
In an alphabet that she can't identify.
How can Monday not seem a holy day
When it provides her the time not only
To learn an ancient language from scratch
But to discover the pages that she's deciphered
Are addressed to her students. "Look," she'll tell them;
"You're not so alone as you think you are.
Here's company fit for a day of rest."
Two Chapters
In the history of my country as yet unwritten,
The woman who fell from the deck of the Mayflower
As it rode at anchor off the shore of the New World
Gets a whole chapter, not just the sentence
William Bradford allows her in his narrative
Of Plymouth Plantation. I can understand
Why he wouldn't have lingered on her even though--
As a note in my edition informs me--she happened
To be his wife. His book, after all, is about
The community he helped to lead, not about himself.
I can understand why he didn't mention the fact
That the woman--the note also informs me--
May have cast herself in the water. His book, after all,
Is about the triumph of hope over adversity
With the aid of divine assistance, not about despair.
All the more reason to give her a chapter--in the history
Of the country as yet unwritten--that tries to imagine
What she had suffered, nine weeks before,
When saying good-bye to many dear ones
Not to be seen again. And how lonely she felt
When crossing the sea with people who considered
The waves of grief that swept over her
As evidence of ingratitude for the promised land
Waiting for them at the end of the voyage.
And then to arrive at last at the edge of a wilderness
Where no one was waiting to welcome them,
No hearth fire where they could assure themselves
That the worst was at last behind them.
And after a chapter on her, a chapter
On the great-granddaughter of her niece,
Still young when the settlement in the wilderness
Was up and running, with its own traditions
Firmly established, own holidays. A full account
Of the young woman's efforts--made clear in her diary
Unearthed only recently--to persuade her husband
Not to join the line of wagons moving west.
Why can't we stay here, she wants to know,
Where our parents and grandparents made a good life
Worshiping as it pleased them to worship?
Why must we leave the land grown dear to us
For the sake of a few more inches of top soil
And fewer stones to be hauled from fields
To make plowing easier? A chapter that dwells
On her effort, when overruled, not to be resentful
But to set disappointment aside and move on.
And decades later, when their children ask them
What the two remember most vividly
From their westward trek, the chapter includes
Not only her seconding of her husband's account
Of the sight from a hill, near sundown,
Of the green dell they were destined to farm,
But also the moment she doesn't mention--
Though she recalls it even more vividly--
Of their wagon's passing, one rainy morning,
In the middle of nowhere, a make-shift grave
With its wooden cross already listing
And no one to clear the weeds away.
Carl Dennis is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including Practical Gods (2001), New and Selected Poems (1974-2004), Callings (2010), and Night School (2017). A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize, he taught for many years in the English Department of the State University of New York, and in the Warren Wilson Writing Program in North Carolina. He lives in Buffalo, New York.