Two poems

I have been neglecting the blog, busy traveling. Though why I don't blog when I'm traveling, I just don't know. Instead I post everything on Facebook. Soon I'm going to provide the links to my daily travelogues here, so I can find them again, if for no other reason. But for today, I wanted to share a couple of poems that are, sort of, related, also not. 

The first is by Ross Gay, writing in honor of Eric Garner on the first anniversary of his murder on July 14, 2014. He was killed by police in a prohibited chokehold, and left us the immortal phrase, "I can't breathe." (As did George Floyd.) The second, by Philip Larkin, I heard read in a movie, Empire of Light, which I watched flying from Paris to Toronto last Friday. 

A Small Needful Fact

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe. 

                                —Ross Gay

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. 

                                —Philip Larkin