Thoughts on poems: Nancy Willard

Chamomile in my small garden. | Abril Warner

Victory Garden 

We planted our garden small. …

*From Skin of Grace, Nancy Willard, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1967, p. 1

There are nine pairs of lines that make up this poignant poem. Nancy Willard uses the garden, and growth itself, in a transformative and evocative manner. This poem is simple in its telling and complex in the feelings that it raises. The opening line starts with something small and personal, and by its end the poem opens to more universal concerns of death in war and the passage of time. This brings me to another poem that is less personal, but in its personification makes one feel close to the profound core of the poem. Carl Sandburg’s Grass, published in Cornhuskers in 1918, is a famous poem with the same universal concerns. It is included here in its entirety from the Poetry Foundation since it is now part of the public domain.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—

                                           I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

                                           What place is this?

                                          Where are we now?

                                           I am the grass.

                                          Let me work.

Here is a unique book inspired by Nancy Willard’s Skin of Grace: Brighton Press.