Sunday morning
22 January 2017

— On my oak tree, high up, six leaves hang in there.

Good Morning All,

Today’s birthday poet is George Gordon, more widely known as Lord Byron. My first introduction to him was by way of my tenth grade teacher, a youngish woman who could barely say Byron's name above a cathedral whisper and who regarded him as the grand Poo-Bah-bah of all poets. So of course I detested the guy.

Mind you, this teacher had the same sort of attitude toward Shakespeare. She’d practically get the vapors just saying his name. Which meant that every boy in our class and most of the girls made a secret and solemn pact to hate all poetry in general and Byron’s and Bill the Bard’s in particular for as long as we lived.

Thank God for our eleventh grade teacher, Miss Krastin, who patiently nursed us back to poetic health.

Anyway, She Walks in Beauty is probably Byron’s most famous poem. It was inspired, apparently, by a cousin of his whom he caught sight of at a ball. She was in mourning, wearing a black dress with spangles, thus his opening lines: She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies.

For me, the cadence of the lines and the euphony of the rhymes are perfectly in step with the young woman’s gait across his captured vision. 

I cannot read this poem without wondering: what did the cousin feel to have such poem written about her? How utterly thrilling would it be to learn some one had bothered to write a poem about one? Would it occur to her that two centuries after she was dust her cousin’s poem would keep a moment of her life alive?

With nothing like Byron’s talent, I must have written a couple of dozen poems for and about Britta. I’m pretty sure the one she liked best was just hastily scribbled on the title page of book for her birthday in 1998, when—though we did not know it then—we’d still have three more years and a bit in her company:

You are emerald Africa in summer time,

Christmas lights in darkling Danish climes,

New England foliage in the fall,

And golden daffodils any day at all!

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron