August is the Gregorian calendar month named after the Roman Augustus Caesar, the man responsible for spreading the Roman Empire over the earth. He wrote about his great accomplishments, writings some think of as the typical age-old boastings of a politician. However, others wrote after his death that upon innumerable occasions he donated money to help others.

In Spite of History

Poet Derek Walcott writes in The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory:

For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten insomniac night. History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.

This seems an important message to us all as we live through politically threatening and tumultuous times in our own country and abroad.

With the ideas of boasting and generosity sifting through my writing thoughts, I wondered if boasting is a way of making the world appear to be in love with oneself or a particular way of falling in love with the world. In poems, it may be that speakers in love with the world are both enthusiastic suitors as well as knowing love objects of the world’s affections.

I decided to write two poems, one in which the speaker boasts about what she has done in the world and one in which the world accepts the poet’s affections.

Either way, praise is offered and praise, Walcott, writes “restores us to the world again, to our luckiness of being.”

Here are the poems:

In August

Each day I rise again whole like the sun and each night
I dream light into the darkness like stars and the moon.

I swim in lakes, rivers and seas, read books in libraries and living
room corners, bus seats and back seats, the love of old lovers

tourists along my mind’s back roads. Lyrics sprinkle
out of old songs like Parmesan cheese.

I twirl trees. I eat wind. I coil roots deep in the earth.

August Note

My cat Joey, curled beside my computer,
drools on the pad with my notes, his tail
wagging just at the tip in time
with my tapping on the keyboard.

I smell garlic from the Chinese Restaurant.
My fingers pause as I think about lunch.
Joey licks his black paws, his white claws
stretched like bridges over a dark inlet.

When I look at Joey, I imagine bridges
are the evidence I need that the world
loves me, however self-involved its grooming,
however much it sees not much of me.

***

I wrote the poem “In August” with the intention of praising the world. The world is big, so I started with the heavens in the first sentence of the poem. I stayed big in the second sentence but thinking of summer, I also thought about the swimming and the reading I did the summers of my childhood. I thought how I loved romantic stories, like Wuthering Heights, and about music I listened to from transistor radios on beach towels and in backyards: 50’s and early 60’s pop radio love songs. I found myself envisioning Parmesan cheese because of my mother’s job with an Italian contractor whose brother owned the local Italian restaurant where I had my first eggplant parmesan. I attached that image to the way old love lyrics sprinkle into tunes I hum even today.  Then, I thought I’d complete the pattern I used at the beginning by ending using natural elements. Next, I read what I’d done and decided that the praise in this very short poem led to appreciating that achieving personal wholeness doesn’t require putting the past away. I wanted a title that could help promote such a reading. “August” appealed to me, both because it is the month I was writing from and because, without capitalization, the word means, “inspiring awe,” fulfilling my assignment on both accounts! Bonus: august also means, “venerated because of age,” and I do think wholeness is something we come to with age.

In “August Notes,” I started out to write about myself as if the world were besotted with me. I had the idea to notice what was around me at the moment I was writing, describe it, and offer it as proof that I am loved. I was pleased to find a moderation of egotism in the tone when I finished writing, a kind of “I can love you even if you don’t love me feeling.”

Whether you are hot and sweltering in this month’s weather, frazzled in air-conditioned traffic jams, squinting in smoke-filled air, or waiting for children to tire of running under sprinklers, take the time to jot down lines, either as a suitor to the world or the world’s besought. It is a way to bring your writer self out of hiding from the heat.