Everyday Poetry

A recent project of mine has been transcribing the diaries of my great aunt. Harriet wrote daily diary entries on the farms and ranches where she lived in Nebraska and South Dakota for over thirty-six years, from January 1, 1920 until 1956, one year before she died. I often wonder what kept her going all those years. What was she thinking as she dutifully recorded the weather, the work, the weariness and the wonderment of her days? For whom was she writing?

I think I found a clue from the last sentence of her entry for March 21, 1932:

“It is now spring so Meadow Larks sing in the snow.”

That is living with everyday intensity, taking the time to note what is extraordinary about ordinary life, paying enough attention to wonder at something that happens all the time (or at least every year), putting that wonder into words and recording those words as though they were as important as headline news because, in so many ways, they are:

it is now spring
so meadowlarks
sing in the snow

Here’s another clue: Not always—in fact, not usually—but often enough to be noteworthy, Harriet was writing poetry in her diaries, the kind of poetry that looks intently at something small, something everyday, something already transforming into something else, and shows us its importance. Hers was a red wheelbarrow
poetry:

it is now
spring
so
meadowlarks sing
in the snow

In the words of Kathleen Norris, author of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, “Plains speech, while nearly devoid of ‘-isms’ and ‘-ologies,’ tends toward the concrete and the personal: weather, the land, other people. Good language for a poet to hear.” Perhaps because there was far less for her to look at than in a city or a more lush environment, Harriet saw the value of what was in front of her: the “great big flakes” that “would melt as they struck earth.” As Norris puts it, “The deprivations of the Plains … tend to turn small gifts into treasures.”

it is now
spring
so meadowlarks
sing
in the snow

This weekend brought to Milwaukee one of those flash spring snows that barely covers the emerging crocuses and daffodils, yet another small, fleeting treasure that I noticed more keenly because of the diary of a woman I never met. Perhaps that is motivation enough for someone reading this to keep noticing and to keep writing.