Harvest of Words

"Harvest" is such a rich word, isn't it? One though that I think has lost much of its richness in our 21st century world. When I was growing up, my mother always had a vegetable garden. I remember those lazy days in the summer, grazing in the garden - picking a handful of peas and sitting on the grass to pop them open and eat them or tugging up the biggest looking carrot and washing it with the garden hose - or maybe just wiping it off on the grass - and munching away.

I suppose we had a kind of a harvest at the end of the year - digging potatoes, picking squash. It wasn't really a true harvest though - the garden was wonderful, but a kind of a luxury, not really a necessity, not the kind of thing we all toiled as a family over from spring through summer. Not the kind of thing we labored to gather in and store for the winter. We're not really used to that kind of seasonal labor, the kind of seasonal labor that's necessary to produce the food we need to survive. I'm not sure that I wish for that kind of hard life again, but I do regret that certain kinds of language lose a certain resonance and joy when they become merely abstract, merely things tied to the past. I suppose that's partly what I love about literature - language is kept alive, language comes alive, makes us remember, remember even the things we've never experienced.

I've been listening to the poet Seamus Heaney read Beowulf this week in bits and pieces (my way of protesting the movie) - and the language is amazing. It's a poem that ought to be listened to, not read and struggled over - most poems ought to be listened to, I suppose. My sisters-in-law have a tradition of inviting several couples over for a Harvest Dinner each autumn - they serve a meal and ask everyone to bring a reading or a poem. We're not quite used to reading poems aloud, are we? It felt a little awkward, but I wish we were a culture that could reacquaint itself with that habit. To hear each other's voices, to savor our language, its sounds, its meanings. It's a way of connecting with one another, connecting with our past, with our present. I love words.

Here is a poem for you:

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,

That appeared once, still wet

As shining chesnuts under a tree in autumn,

And, touched, coddled, began to live

In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,

Tribes on the march, planets in motion.

"We are," they said, even as their pages

Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame

Licked away their letters. So much more durable

Than we are, whose frail warmth

Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.

I imagine the earth when I am no more:

Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,

Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.

Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,

Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

--Czeslaw Milosz