Each March and April I spend waiting, watching for the first opportunity to put my hands back into the earth. Today was finally warm enough, and there was time enough, to get to work in the garden. What pleasure to there is simply in clearing away last year’s leaves to give ample breathing room to the bright green things pushing up toward heaven. “Weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush,” as Hopkins puts it.
The lilies are up, as are the peonies, irises, astilbe, bleeding heart, phlox, catmint, dianthus, and salvia. The phlox, the forsythia, and the azaleas are already blooming. Among the wildflowers, the violets are here, the dandelions, and the mayflowers. The bees riot in the pear trees. The Jane magnolias, one of my favorite trees, are in full bloom. Though when you look to the hills, the trees still appear gray and bare, the beeches, oaks, and maples have put out their first tiny leaves, and within three or four weeks the canopy should be in full flush. At night the cicadas, crickets, and frogs keep up a chorus. The fox has had her kits! And though the mornings are still chilly enough for a fire, and I still have to bundle up in sweater and down coat for baseball games, today is gloriously fine and everything in sight suggests the approach of summer. “What is all this juice and all this joy?/A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning/In Eden garden.”
But that will have to suffice for this month’s Calendar of Firsts, since I haven’t been keeping a better record. Let this post instead be a chance for me to include a poem in honor of Mary Magdalene, though it was written by Osip Mandelstam for Natasha Shtempel, a young woman who befriended him and his wife while they were in exile in Voronezh. Indeed, she was the only one of the town’s inhabitants who did so. Everyone else, having succumbed to Stalin’s terror, utterly shunned them and closed their doors upon them. The poem is the last one written before he returned from exile, about a year and a half before he died alone in a transit camp on his way to the labor camps of Siberia.
Why am I posting it? I have been meaning to ever since Easter, since it is really about the Resurrection and, I think, a hope for the redemption and perfection of all that has been. But more than that, because it of course turns one’s mind to Mary Magdalene, of whom I happen to be thinking today.
To Natasha Shtempel
I
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead
of her swift friend and her fiance.
The restraining freedom
of her inspiring disability pulls her along,
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the clarity of a concept:
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave’s vault,
and that this is an eternal beginning.
II
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth;
their every step is loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angles, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won’t be able to take.
Flowers are immortal. Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.