And, these are poems concerning places.
And, the first poem is about Vermont,
where we live in the summertime.
And we live up in the mountains, and, up there,
our nearest neighbors live there year-round.
And when we first moved up there,
the father was a woodsman.
He had taken a course by mail on how to run road machinery,
and doing better for himself, and is working on the road,
actually.
But they're very simple people and have
many, many beautiful ceremonies, especially connected
with the one-room schoolhouse.
And every morning, for instance, the children
go out of doors and pledge allegiance to the flag
and raise the flag together, but it's a very serious ceremony.
And they have a particularly beautiful thing
they do for Memorial Day.
All of the mountain children go out
and gather wildflowers and lilacs, too.
Everything, but mostly wildflowers.
And they fill up their wagons, and bring them
down to the school, and then the parents come,
and they all sit outside, and then
there is this very serious program--
short program-- and they sing [INAUDIBLE].
And then, they get in a line with the wagons of flowers
and children, and they cross the bridge
from the one-room schoolhouse to the little pre-revolutionary
graveyard, where they put the flowers around on the graves.
And these children down the road from me,
we've known them now [? since they ?] [? were-- ?]
it's a large family--
since the oldest ones were small.
And now, they're getting [? past ?] that age of--
or they're going into that age, when
I wrote this poem, that metamorphosis
that comes around--
12, some of them were.
And I mentioned [? that ?] [? in ?] [? the-- ?]
it's called "A Ceremony of Flowers in Vermont".
Out by the nettles, by last year's blackberry canes,
Jeanette is daydreaming in the sun.
The stand of hemlocks edging the ravine, black and green,
laces a dark roof above the trillium.
Wan fine veined spring beauties
crowd around the rocks in the open field,
and trout lilies fill in between the mosses, where
the other children run, jumping from rock
to rock in the high meadow under the flocks of crows.
All horse and ruckus in the windy blowing away
of the snow mold.
And where the last old patches withered to gray,
wind flowers clash in the soundless chiming of petals.
The others have gone over the fence,
up field, to gather flowers for Memorial Day.
They are sticky with nettles, Richard and Lauri and Rachel.
They have grown too large for their winter jackets.
Their pale veined wrists hang down below their sleeves.
They have put crow's foot and adder's-tongue into their
pockets, and they are all shouting with a strange new
language [INAUDIBLE].