june

They dropped like flakes, they dropped like stars,
Like petals from a rose,
When suddenly across the June
A wind with fingers goes.

They perished in the seamless grass, –
No eye could find the place;
But God on his repealless list
Can summon every face.

The nearest dream recedes, unrealized.
The heaven we chase
Like the June bee
Before the school-boy
Invites the race;
Stoops to an easy clover –
Dips — evades — teases — deploys;
Then to the royal clouds
Lifts his light pinnace
Heedless of the boy
Staring, bewildered, at the mocking sky.

Homesick for steadfast honey,
Ah! the bee flies not
That brews that rare variety.

These are the days when birds come back,
A very few, a bird or two,
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies put on
The old, old sophistries of June, –
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the bee,
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief,

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear,
And softly through the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf!

Oh, sacrament of summer days,
Oh, last communion in the haze,
Permit a child to join,

Thy sacred emblems to partake,
Thy consecrated bread to break,
Taste thine immortal wine!

There is a flower that bees prefer,
And butterflies desire;
To gain the purple democrat
The humming-birds aspire.

And whatsoever insect pass,
A honey bears away
Proportioned to his several dearth
And her capacity.

Her face is rounder than the moon,
And ruddier than the gown
Of orchis in the pasture,
Or rhododendron worn.

She doth not wait for June;
Before the world is green
Her sturdy little countenance
Against the wind is seen,

Contending with the grass,
Near kinsman to herself,
For privilege of sod and sun,
Sweet litigants for life.

And when the hills are full,
And newer fashions blow,
Doth not retract a single spice
For pang of jealousy.

Her public is the noon,
Her providence the sun,
Her progress by the bee proclaimed
In sovereign, swerveless tune.

The bravest of the host,
Surrendering the last,
Nor even of defeat aware
When cancelled by the frost.

The Independent reviews an interesting new novel, “The Opposite House”, by Helen Oyeyemi, which mixes the poetry and ideas of Emily Dickinson with Cuban Santeria. It’s hard to imagine two worlds so different, but the review certainly makes this an intriguing novel:

The novel follows two parallel narratives: pregnant Maja, an Afro-Cuban jazz singer living in London with her white Ghanaian lover, and Yemaya or Aya, a Santeria Goddess in the “somewherehouse” with its two doors on to Lagos and London. “I feel there are two different kinds of real,” Oyeyemi says. “Each story is the story of the house opposite it. They are like reversals of each other.”

This novel becomes available State-side on June 19; you can be sure it goes on my library reserve list soon thereafter, no doubt with a review at my usual site.