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    Midwinter at Walden Pond
    Midwinter at Walden Pond
    Midwinter at Walden Pond
    Ebook76 pages31 minutes

    Midwinter at Walden Pond

    By Michael Jackson

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    About this ebook

    An ice-bound New England pond utterly still, though racked with sub-glacial groans serves as an image of a mind overwhelmed one moment by troubling memories, the next by the peace that passes all understanding. In his new collection, Michael Jackson explores the impact on a poets consciousness of past and present events both personal and historical - and the possibility of transcendence in love and creative work.

    Without ever submitting to bland fashion or to clique, Michael Jackson for almost fifty years has written poetry which is that of a man confronting the things happening of his time, poems probing at that recurrent query, where does one take ones place in the terrible parades of history. There is no final reply. But by love, by compassion, by constant attention to what is said and how it is written, the questioning itself, with luck, sustains. What one hears in his readings is the modest, confident, international voice that drives his poems, the conversing of a man who, as ever, is on one road to find another. Vincent OSullivan.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse
    Release dateNov 12, 2013
    ISBN9781491831007
    Midwinter at Walden Pond
    Author

    Michael Jackson

    Michael Jackson is an Anthropologist and Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. His many anthropological books include Existential Anthropology, The Palm at the End of the Mind, and Between One and One Another. He’s the author and editor of over twenty books.

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      Book preview

      Midwinter at Walden Pond - Michael Jackson

      Midwinter at Walden Pond

      I am walking around a so-called Kettle Pond

      on a sub-zero January morning, made more bitter

      by the arctic wind that chafes and burns my face

      when I turn into it. This is the only unpolluted lake

      for miles around, the spring-fed pond where Thoreau

      built his hut (desk, chair, pot-bellied stove and cot)

      and daily wrote the thoughts and observations

      that would make his name. This morning, though,

      my mind is on the ice-bound pond’s bizarre

      sonority—squeaking, gulping, stomach-

      rumbling groans, as if Thoreau’s ghost had been

      disturbed, or Melville’s Leviathan were about to sound.

      Through pitch pines, I glimpse a single skater

      making tracks across the frozen

      snow-dusted surface, as if he too

      has sought to live deliberately and find

      companionship in solitude. I take

      the uphill path to where the great man lived

      two years, two months, two days, the site

      now marked by a random pile of stones,

      some bearing the engraved or painted names

      of those who made their pilgrimage to Walden Pond

      and in the hornbeams’ shade shared

      their favorite passages from his book,

      blessed by the down-turned gestures of the pines,

      hearing the anomalous whistle of a train.

      I am not one of them, I know. I only take

      this path for exercise, or the possibility of

      a poem, suffering only snow from a low bough,

      the groan of pack ice pressed in upon itself,

      as I try to decipher the skater’s

      random signature, or ask why visitors would hurl

      big stones out on the ice unless it was to see

      if it could bear their weight. In Central Australia

      those who take stones from a sacred site

      are cursed. To bring them here, is to be blessed.

      Surely I am not the first nor will be last to find

      that a frozen lake can free the mind.

      Tsunami

      Sometimes all it takes

      is a single photograph—

      a Japanese boy

      at his Elementary School’s Graduation

      in Kesennuma,

      ten days after the tsunami.

      No black wall of water,

      no Toyotas tossed about like boxes

      in the ugly flood,

      only tears streaking his swollen face

      as he stands with his classmates

      in a hall that has been cleared

      of evacuees to make room for the annual

      prize-giving ceremony,

      when promises will be made

      of greater goods and higher things,

      though only yards away

      emergency workers lay out the dead

      and list the missing that lie beneath the fetid silt

      or inhale dead air

      in a gap no one can fill.

      On the other side of the world

      a poet, blinded by

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