New Year's Day, 2017, 3 p.m., Prospect Park. The solstice is still palpable at the Peristyle.
Lakeside, the new landscape, is beautiful in winter, too.
Christmas touches of red have yet to be bleached by January.
On the ice, uncertain next steps are just part of the fun...for most of us, anyway.
I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.
"The Round," by Stanley Kunitz. Copyright 1995.
After a cool, rainy Fourth of July, Prospect Park burst into summer glory on Saturday and Sunday.
We went over to Lakeside on Sunday, 24 hours after a tragedy darkened Saturday's festivities.
The lake was peaceful, its surface rippled only by a family of swans. But the previous day, police divers dragged its murk for hours searching for a 2-year-old girl who wandered away from a barbecue near the Boathouse with her 4-year-old cousin, according to the New York Times and other outlets. Her father, an Uzbekistani cabbie, and her mother were tending to kabobs; in the cheerful picnic chaos, the unthinkable happened. I remember my own little girl somehow vanishing from my side once in a Babies-R-Us; I could swear I never let go of her hand, yet she managed to wander off into a playset while I got halfway across the floor before noticing she was gone.
Choppers, canine teams, and a host of concerned strangers combed the park after the boy was found alone, covered with the algae blooming on the lake's surface.
We once walked by the shore with a little girl who cheerfully strode out onto the dense mats of duckweed, thinking it was solid turf, and we laughed as she sunk in up to her shins. Was that what happened to these little ones, I wonder?
Little Rushona Kurbonova was lifted out by police divers about 6 p.m. After hours of anguished waiting, her distraught mother collapsed and was taken off on a stretcher. Her family will reportedly return to Uzbekistan to bury her. My thoughts and prayers are with them in this unimaginable grief, and also with these good men of the NYPD who experienced the terrible sorrow of recovering her.
In this short Life that only lasts an hour
Yesterday was gorgeous, but the flooded lake-edge bore witness to the recent round of deluges. (This morning, it was undoubtedly replenished.) The lake-next-to-a-lake created double swan clouds.
Three swans were hanging around; one had its leathery black foot tucked up at a strange angle as if useless, but its paddling was unaffected.
Today is the birthday of William Butler Yeats, shown here looking awfully Daniel-Day-Lewisy. What better excuse for the haunting last stanzas of his famous poem, "The Wild Swans of Coole"?
...I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
William Butler Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
Spring is the Period
Express from God.
Among the other seasons
Himself abide,
But during March and April
None stir abroad
Without a cordial interview
With God.
--Emily Dickinson
Ice Rescue
By Brenda Becker
So suddenly you slipped beneath.
You strode out strong across the unmarked white,
Footfalls plunging down on frozen turf.
If there was a sign—
Danger, Stay back—you missed it, future-drawn
Amid the bare trees.
And then, a crack;
A nothingness arose around your feet, and icewater closed fast around your heart.
I rushed out to the lake,
My mission clear,
Launched onto my belly, easy now, I’m here,
This is what I do.
Shifted and reached from deep inside my weight,
Nudged out the ladder, focused on your face,
a soft beacon of terror and apology
above the still dark island of your trust.
But the crust gave way,
The ladder was not long enough,
The water was too deep and cold.
I couldn’t reach you, had to turn away, but didn’t leave;
Together we waited, held apart by floe
Until the roar of rescue overhead
Bent the bare trees and opened up the sky.
Are robins becoming more numerous? Every spring, there seem to be more of them. This guy was taking a violent bath in the park's lake.
Freshly storm-soaked and chilly, Prospect Park at sunset was subdued and lightly populated. Spring green, a thousand shades of it, is everywhere, along with splashes of delicate white.
It's surprising how many trees glow red in their first tender foliage. This maple on Nellie's Lawn was one.
The baby leaves on this oak blushed, too.
Almost home, in the Parade Grounds, I happened on this sidewalk memorial. A quick Googling revealed that Tamon Robinson was a beloved employee in a Fort Greene "Connecticut Muffin" coffee shop where, curiously, we just stopped in last Sunday after catching a movie at BAM. We had wondered about the oaktag memorial poster in the window; apparently the young man was run down by an NYPD squad car last week under mysterious circumstances and later died. Not surprisingly, his grieving family is seeking answers. How he came to be mourned among the ballfields of Flatbush, or by whom, I do not know.
Gotcha! A week of late-May-like weather had everything bolting into bloom, but after a freezing night, some blossoms, like these magnolias on Wellhouse Drive, appeared to regret the hard-partying spring break.
In my own garden, the hyacinths pumped out their heavy blooms seemingly overnight, then dropped face-forward into the dirt. In the park, the daffodils seemed impervious to extremes, nodding in the chilly late-afternoon sun.
Songs of red-wing blackbirds richocheted around the lake shore, along with those of doves, cardinals, robins, geese, gulls, and a helicopter. Yet a deep stillness seemed to envelop the little Wellhouse, a building that always feels haunted to me. Perhaps it's because a vast well actually lies beneath here, its outline traced by a sunken circle in the ground.
A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King
But God be with the Clown,
Who ponders this tremendous scene—
This whole experiment of green,
As if it were his own!
—Emily Dickinson, "The Single Hound," XXXVIII
The day after Thanksgiving involved pie for breakfast. Later, I dragged the three of us to the park. A brisk mid-afternoon walk, this time of year, quickly becomes a sunset walk.
Drummers' Grove stood empty.
Oak leaves piled up against the Oriental Pavilion.
Across the lake, an animated party (bridal, apparently) worked with a photographer by the rustic shelter. He had rigged up elaborate reflectors, but none as good as the lake itself.
Seed structures everywhere...in readiness for dispersal, death and rebirth.
We drank coffee on the Boathouse steps as the sun sank behind the trees.
Good Lord, Advent starts tomorrow...just in time to ease the heart as the shadows stretch their longest.
I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman,
the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things
come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go,
not one lasts.
Autumn Movement by Carl Sandburg
Guest park for this Memorial Day: Cypress Hills National Cemetery, which I chanced upon while driving down Jamaica Avenue some weeks ago. A sea of white petals and tombstones under a weeping spring sky...no jumble of angels and Victorian mausoleums here, just chaste rows of nearly identical markers. Who were these marble regiments?
First set aside for Civil War dead (both Union soldiers and Confederate POWs), this is also the resting place of men who served in Verdun, in the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana, among others; there are even a few re-interred Revolutionary War vets here.
But the stones nearest at hand belonged to young men, presumably from Brooklyn, who served in the "Forgotten War"—Korea. Herbert Leonard (Infantry) and Patrick Montagano (Air Force) both died before their 20th birthdays.
It's strange just how forgotten this war is, since the brutal and insane dictatorship in North Korea is still jerking the world's chain and martyring its own people. Here is an excerpt from "Our War," by Korean War veteran Anthony DeBlasi, from a worthwhile site called Korean War Educator. Take a moment from those barbeques, beach trips and shopping sprees to listen:
In this "Land of the Morning Calm,"
No, Mourning Calm —
Lorded over by Chinese,
Savaged by the Japanese,
Ravaged by World War II —
Ever looking for a brighter future,
A gentle people, constantly misled,
Got hell instead.When the shooting stopped,
Was it victory or stalemate?
After more than 50 years,
Some still wonder —
Why, why all that blood,
The unspeakable holocaust,
The infinite pain?
Was it all in vain?Let no one doubt the outcome
Of that fight:
We put the murderous invaders back
Where they belonged,
And answered the respective quests
Of Kim and Mao and Joe
With No! and No! and No!More: we helped the people of the south
Show their northern kinfolk and the world
The success of people set free
From fear and tyranny.In every grateful heart —
Given a chance to live on their own terms,
Spared from further bomb and bullet,
Lord and sword —
We have our reward.