NaPoWriMo Day 25: "Mistress Dyer in Springtime"

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt:  "I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that: 1) Is specific to a season; 2) Uses imagery that relates to all five senses (sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell); 3) Includes a rhetorical question, (like Keats’ “where are the songs of spring?”).

Today's PAD Challenge prompt:  "For today’s prompt, write an exile poem. Exile is a noun, a verb, and an American rock band from Richmond, Kentucky. A person, animal, or object can be exiled. But people and animals also exile others–or even exile themselves."

The idea of exile immediately made me know I would write one of my Mary Dyer poems, which I haven't done in a while -- technically she experienced banishment, but that's pretty much the same thing. And choosing the 17th century led me to the Psalm 137 with its reference to the Babylonian exile and its famous rhetorical question that it seemed very fitting Mary should ponder.

The verses are quoted from the 1599 Geneva Bible, not the King James Version. Anne Hutchinson (the "she" here) preferred the Geneva Bible, so I am having Mary Dyer use it here as well, though that may not be historically accurate. But I like how it very slightly estranges the wording from what we are familiar with (or hear as a Bob Marley song, though it was actually the Linda Ronstadt version I grew up with).

This is another late-night rush job, but I hope to come back to it in future.

Mistress Dyer in Springtime

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget to play.

The taste of first greens, sharp-bitter,

and always the salt of the bay.

As we rise before dawn, bird-music

breaking my heart with fineness.

Standing on the water’s edge

I look north towards Portsmouth still,

as if she were still there,

though she is gone, gone, bodiless,

hurried towards another choir,

the sweet music of eternal grace.

How we groan in the ache of birthing it.

The ring of shore and sea before us:

this, I think, is like the heart,

empty and full at once.

A new year come, and what is it I wait for

to turn the waters sweet again?

The tree at pasture’s edge glows yellow.

We hanged our harps upon the willows

in the midst thereof.

In the smell of grass and growth

I step in among its hanging withies

and grasp one, wrap it hard around my wrist.

So it mark me; no pain I know not already.

How shall we sing, said we, a song of the Lord

in a strange land?

          

Narragansett Bay from Newport, more or less what Mary Dyer is looking at.

--Draft by Anne Myles. Please do not copy, cite, or quote without permission.