April arrives on wings and in poetry

OK, it snowed here again and, like me, it’s getting old. By the time you read this missive, the landscape will be changing quickly, from the melt and muck of March to what writer Ray Bradbury called, “A land as bright, beloved and blue as any Yeats found to be true.” Or as Yeats’ contemporary A.E. Housman so beautifully penned in his collection of poems, A Shropshire Lad. “When in spring we turn toward the pastoral, whether it be out a back window, or on a trip to a nearby town along a scenic ridge line, Houseman asks, “What are those blue remembered hills? What spires, what farms are those?”

And I can answer the question, at least for me, a simple man who loves poetry but was never educated in the intricacies of the stuff. Probably would have ruined it for me had I been. The blue remembered hills are recognizable to those of us in a certain age group, those of us who can still recall an era long consigned to the great dustbins of history, the blue hills of memory. And the spires and farms? Out here they are everywhere to be found, both figuratively and literally, church steeples high above newly-budding treetops dotting the landscape, waiting for Easter, and all of our farms, small and large, remaining everywhere.

Speaking of Easter, I’ve been listening to portions of G.F. Handel’s extraordinary oratorio “Messiah,” music written to be performed and sung at Easter, not Christmas. Not sure why that changed. It was first performed in Dublin, Ireland in 1742, at Easter. More than 270 years after “Messiah” debuted I was fortunate enough to be in the front row for a wonderful, moving, full orchestra, chorus, performance of the oratorio, where it all first took place, in Dublin. I cried. Let us bring it back to Easter.

Last night coyotes were active again, keening and yipping long after dark. They reside in and around the bluffs below my house, bluffs I’ve never dared to explore as it’s the province of wild creatures, not a place where we humans should be poking around. The night before I again listened to a barred owl, a beautiful bird whose call is nothing short of Shakespearean, not iambic pentameter, but two measures, each containing for beats. Bird lovers describe the call as, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?” I suppose that’s a simple way to remember it, however, it feels like a bit more creativity might be in order, something more literary for such a grand being.

And so April lies ahead, a yawning, unpredictable expanse of time begun by celebrating fools and, following in a week, by the viewing of a solar eclipse which the ancients must have found to be terrifying, thinking the world was coming to an end or that, at the very least, they were being warned about something, perhaps an accounting of their sins. And you wonder how a merchant a couple of thousand years ago felt when he stepped into the street as an eclipse took place. Did he think about the passage of his own life, whether he had done right by others before the end came and took him? Or did he simply lie awake in his bed that night, trying to sort it all out, eventually letting it go?

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald recently published a 60-page magazine of Kurt’s columns. The magazine can be purchased here.