Enjoying The Signs Of Spring

In the midst of a busy week, sometimes the smallest of things give you a clue to get back to poetry. On a Wednesday morning that felt more like it should be Friday, I picked up a copy of the Metro Express, a smaller, free version of the Washington Post and flipped to the crossword puzzle while awaiting my morning bus. One of the clues referenced a work by poet James…AGEE, four letters down. A writer all his life, early in his life Agee wrote for Fortune, Time and film criticism in The Nation.

Perhaps best known as a writer of screenplays (The African Queen; The Night of the Hunter), Agee also wrote books, was a freelance journalist, movie and art criticism and smaller eclectic pieces and could probably write just about anything. Unfortunately he died at the age of 46, from a heart attack in a cab in New York on the way to his doctor’s office after a life of hard drinking and chain smoking. Turns out, he was a poet too.

It saddens me and serves as a reminder that so many talented, prolific and beautiful writers cut their own lives short by poisoning themselves to death. What a great reminder on this lovely spring day that life is indeed for living and not for dying.

Permit Me A Voyage
By James Agee

Take these who will as may be: I
Am careless now of what they fail:
My heart and mind discharted lie
And surely as the nerved nail

Appoints all quarters on the north
So now it designates him forth
My sovereign God my princely soul
Whereon my flesh is priestly stole:

Whence forth shall my heart and mind
To God through soul entirely bow,
Therein such strong increase to find
In truth as is my fate to know:

Small though that be great God I know
I know in this gigantic day
What God is ruined and I know
How labors with Godhead this day:

How from the porches of our sky
The crested glory is declined:
And hear with what translated cry
The stridden soul is overshined:

And how this world of wildness through
True poets shall walk who herald you:
Of whom God grant me of your grace
To be, that shall preserve this race.

Permit me voyage, Love, into your hands.