Bird Two: So Much Depends

To me, William Carlos Williams' spare, single-sentence poem The Red Wheelbarrow has a wonderful concreteness and simplicity that perfectly conveys the beauty and significance of utility, the dignity of the ordinary. It also represents a stellar example of the kind of "word-picture" writing teachers try to tell us that poetry should be. Upon reading it, you conjure a vivid, immediate, immutable image. A contemporary poet who similarly celebrates everyday things with an amazingly apt concision (though not as spare as Williams' wheelbarrow) is Valerie Worth. I love her collections of Small Poems, even though they are for children (or maybe because they are for children). I love sharing them with children, too. My favorite is Zinnias -- which celebrates the flowers' resolute strength, concluding "I know/ Someone like zinnias; I wish/ I were like zinnias." I do wish I were like zinnias -- at least sometimes.

Williams and his wheelbarrow also remind me of the final lines in another favorite poem, Naomi Shihab Nye's Famous:

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,

but because it never forgot what it could do.

So, here's Bird Two... a single-sentence homage to an ordinary thing....

Church Key

Whether christened
in nod to brewer-monks
shuffling down into
the lager cellar,

named for heavy-headed likeness
to noble hunks of iron
fitted into pious locks
within towering oaken doors,

or labeled as irreverent wink towards
a different sort of worship...
I rejoice in its releasing
of my beer.

(I love, love church key -- the concept, the phrase and the object. The connotation and denotation make such a lovely, resonant clash.)