May Day

May We

May Day
For the dryads and the Soviets
And a Saint Joseph
Day as well

A folkloric opening to spring
In the belief the season
Has
Without much doubt
Arrived

At least in northern land
With
The reverse to the south where we
Are opposite
For not being winter

The May pole
Is a deal

And somehow parades of weapons
Maybe to say
To show
This is that kind of spring for us

Well
Mostly a new month all round
And with associations

And we might not have caught it is
The first
Or think of it another way
To have

Hmm
There also the expression of alarm
Rhyming and quick
To use
And so it’s used

So
We do things with this day
From folklore
And religion
Through to politics
And
A call for help
That the others might
Incite

Good
Day
Though there’s context
Past and present
Or maybe good as any other day
In which we live some fullness
For
The living

Though
In case of Jeopardy!
We have a few questions for the columns

And
By the way
Some of us know what
To plant now
By
The day within the season

C L Couch

Photo by Tapio Haaja on Unsplash
(Finland)

(x = space)

May Polemics

The first day of May

Owned by ancients

And Christians,

Soviets

Now socialists

A day entrenched in green

Because in the north

It certainly must

Be spring

An extra day for Joseph

It was a matter of religion

In repression

But doesn’t the dancing

Go back extra ages

Before the cross supplanted?

Well, in some parts

They all go together,

Which might be something

To think about

Except that mainly folk

Simply have the day

Dance out loud

Or in the mind dance

Reason out

Embrace contraries

All the parts

With each other later

If ever

Happy May Day, folks

Of many kinds

And ages

On the field

All sunlit

C L Couch

Photo by Yuliia Tretynychenko on Unsplash

Kyiv, Ukraine

Published 3 hours ago [from 8 a.m. EDT]

note

William Blake is famously (and reasonably) quoted claiming that “without contraries there is no progression.” Peter Elbow, a writing and teaching practitioner and theorist, takes Blake’s understanding of contraries in application and in titling his work Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching. Both writers and their works tend to resonate with me.