It's the third Thursday of the month so I'd like to welcome you to A Gathering of Poetry. I don't know where I found this poem, but I love the word "swobtoggle", so I've been saving it until flowers and grass were beginning to get "high on the expensive chemistry of their mitochondrial explosion."
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| Happy Little Grass Cells (actually vascular bundles, xylem and phloem) as seen under magnification. |
Please Don't
by Tony Hoagland
tell the flowers—they think
the sun loves them.
The grass is under the same
simple-minded impression
about the rain, the fog, the dew.
And when the wind blows,
it feels so good
they lose control of themselves
and swobtoggle wildly
around, bumping accidentally into their
slender neighbors.
Forgetful little lotus-eaters,
solar-powered
hydroholics, drawing nourishment up
through stems into their
thin green skin,
high on the expensive
chemistry of mitochondrial explosion,
believing that the dirt
loves them, the night, the stars—
reaching down a little deeper
with their pale albino roots,
all Dizzy
Gillespie with the utter
sufficiency of everything.
They don't imagine lawn
mowers, the four stomachs
of the cow, or human beings with boots
who stop to marvel
at their exsquisite
flexibility and color.
They persist in their soft-headed
hallucination of happiness.
But please don't mention it.
Not yet. Tell me
what would you possibly gain
from being right?
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Tony Hoagland, "Please Don’t" from Application for Release from the Dream. Copyright © 2015 by Tony Hoagland.
You can read more about the poet here.
====
Thank
you for reading and joining us for our monthly Gathering of Poetry. You
are
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This is wonderful! It's also a fabulous example of how science and the humanities can happily coexist, which makes me happy. I'm now going to look for excuses to the use the word "swobtoggle"!
ReplyDeleteOh my! I loved this line: "all Dizzy Gillespie with the utter sufficiency of everything." Sheer genius... thank you so much for sharing this today! (My Daffodils are all swobtoggle this morning... and I am delighting with them!)
ReplyDeleteSwobtoggle is such a great word and this poem is SO FUN!!!
ReplyDeleteI absolutely LOVE this, Bonny. Such a clever, clever mix of science + language. And the timing is perfect . . . because the swobtoggling is happening before our eyes. XO
ReplyDeleteI love this one, Bonny! And it is perfectly timed. It reminds me of the fact that it is also not productive to dwell on what makes us fall in love. Who cares! Let's just swallow in the magic of spring without thinking too much of botany.
ReplyDeleteI just found a few of my newly blooming daffodils with their poor heads bent down to the ground and I'm sad. Should I pick them and put them in a jar in the house? It seems wrong.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what the right thing is to do for your daffodils but I just picked six or eight of mine and put them in a vase on the kitchen table. They look quite cheerful and are ready to swobtoggle indoors.
DeleteI won't be the one to tell!
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful exuberant poem. I learned a new word - swobtoggle! Here's to Spring!
ReplyDelete