Poetry and Luck

When I was a child in Texas, my family lived in an old wooden house on land my ancestors had owned and that my father had cleared of brush and trees. In our yard were patches of clover in which I and my sisters and brother would often find four-leaf clovers. We would press the clovers between pages of books and then glue them to cardstock to make bookmarks or tape them to letters we sent to cousins. I'll bet we've never felt so lucky since. Today while walking from the compost bin where I had deposited potato peelings, I glanced down and saw a four-leaf clover at my feet. Of course, I plucked it, and it's now pressed flat inside the back cover of Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. Looking at this picture I took of my four-leaf clover, I remembered a poem that I wrote years ago. I never have been satisfied with any version, but I've done a bit of tinkering with it this evening, and it captures some of my feeling about that




Early Luck

At the concrete steps of our childhood home
each spring through summer we would find
clover of the most unusual kind,
four-leaved, even five or six-leaved.
We soon grew confident of our treasure,
just minutes needed to bring to hand
a lucky token grown on demand,
it seemed, to our then more trusting minds.
We could hardly pass a leafy patch
without stopping to search, to count
the leaves whose numbers seemed to surmount
all odds, all natural probabilities.
We plucked our luck, then pressed it flat,
its green life turning brittle, dull as a dollar bill.
With steady fingers and cut-and-paste skill
of children, we fastened our fortune to paper.
Like prayers to St. Jude our letters were mailed,
those splayed-out specimens of luck bestowing grace
on all correspondents who touched that holy space
where we had glued the simple optimism
we never quite lost, though pressed hard by sorrows
and dulled by time. I learned luck rarely follows
one's wish, one's desire. But I still pause when I pass
a patch of dark clover in a lawn of grass.

Anita D-G

At about the same time I put away what I thought would be the final, disappointing version of that poem, I took up writing haiku. Oh, like most people, I had written haiku as literary exercises in high school. But now, years later, I had discovered the works of Matsuo Basho, a Japanese master of haiku, and I sought to capture in three lines suspended moments of daily experience. At first I tried to write one haiku every day; that goal diminished to one haiku a week. Finally, I thought I would write enough haiku in a year to fill a favorite pottery jar. I wrote each haiku on a small square of post-it paper, rolled up the paper, tied it with ribbon, and dropped it in the jar. At the end of the year, I planned to host a party, invite friends, drink some wine, smoke some cigars, and read the haiku by candlelight. The party never transpired, the pottery jar never quite filled, but this evening, I've one more haiku to add. If only there were a few cigar-smoking friends still around.....

Hydrangeas, old jar,
the years are long between us--
your face blooms fresh here.