Ross gay wedding poem
Welcome to the season of sunflowers, those wide-open beauties that pose on sturdy stems and extend for the sky with unlocked faces.
This week&#;s poem is linked here from Poetry Foundation, where it is printed with permission. &#;wedding poem&#;, by Ross Gay, is a celebration of watching &#;a goldfinch kissing/ a sunflower/ again and again&#;&#; and of
&#;being, simply, glad,
which such love,
if we let it,
makes us feel.&#;
This poem appears in Gay&#;s collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Aptly titled, the collection honors death, reconciliation, coming together in the act of growing and harvesting, and, of course, feeling gratitude.
It is, indeed, &#;unabashed&#; in its wide embrace, its short-lined, inviting poems that often incorporate a colloquial direct address to the reader such as &#;Friends&#;,&#; and a kind of kind, self-deprecating honesty that is charming and disarming. As I study these poems, I feel fancy I&#;ve been welcomed into the community of the Bloomington Community Orchard alongside Gay to serve , listen, play, converse, and be. In the Acknowledge
Dear readers,
Thank you kindly for following along for another April of verse. I want to close this month with one of my favorite poems, written by the brilliant Ross Gay ().
I realize many of the works I selected this month (and for years prior) may seem a little dark at times. But I love this poem so much because it speaks to my most hopeful self, the self that believes so fervently that amidst all this darkness there is so much life and light to be grateful for&#;not the least of which are beautiful words and all of you for taking the time to appreciate them alongside me.
&#;Sorrow is Not My Name&#;
—after Gwendolyn Brooks
No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, thick sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million natur
Wedding Poem
From the title of Ross Gay’s “Wedding Poem,” the reader understands that this is an epithalamion, or poem intended to celebrate nuptials. The speaker invokes the language of a traditional wedding ceremony by beginning the poem in the manner of an officiate: “Friends I am here” (Line 1) echoes the phrase, “We are gathered here,” an opener recognizable as the beginning of many a wedding ceremony, in tone if not verbatim. In addition, a dedication reads, “for Keith and Jen,” presumably the couple for whom the poem is written.
The speaker proceeds to “modestly report” (Line 1) something he’d seen in his hometown, “in an orchard” (Line 2). While the verb of a “town” (Line 3) does not necessarily indicate an urban environment, the impression is that the orchard exists in a populated environment, rather than in a typical rural setting. The orchard is visible, in other words, to passersby. What the speaker sees is “a goldfinch kissing / a sunflower” (Lines ). While the two protagonists of the story are a bird and a plant, the fact that they embrace, “again and again” (Lin
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Throughout his poems, Gay often deals with the intensity of feelings. Using a highly image rich language, he describes love, sadness, hate, pleasure in extremely vivid tones. The feeling of depression is exemplified in the beginning of "Opera Singer", joy is part of "Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude. A mixture of hate and dejection can be found in "Love, I'm done with you". Pure love, finally, is found in "Poem to my child, if ever you shall be". These examples, among many, showcase the vivid language and the depth of emotion within the poetry of Ross Gay.
While not a central theme of whole poetic collections, family is a recurring topic. It can be establish in the shape of a wedding of friends in "Wedding Poem", a yearning for what might be in "Poem to my child, if ever you shall be" or a thankful note towards a father in "Catalogu of Unabashed Gratitude". The concept of family is always depicted positively, shedding some beam on the personal