Poet's Corner: "Tamed" by George Bilgere

As summer draws to a close (school starts next week here in Georgia- good grief!) I thought it would be good to pass along this poem I stumbled on a while back.

Because of the subject matter, it may remind you of this Ray Bradbury post, but while I think it certainly speaks to “summertime,” I think it also celebrates boyhood, rites of passage, and our relationship to the earth around us. A poem for the common man. Have a look:

Tamed

By George Bilgere

This summer my nephew
is old enough for his first job:
mowing the lawn.

I watch him lean his skinny chest
to the bar of the pushmower,
put his weight into it, and become,

for the first time, a beast in harness,
a laborer on the face of the earth,
somehow withering and expanding at the same time

into something worn and ancient, but still
a kid withal. And I remember
how bitterly I went into the traces,

hating that Saturday ritual
for a while, then growing inexplicably
into it, gradually mastering

the topography of the yard,
sometimes using the back and forth technique,
sometimes going for the checkerboard effect,
or my favorite, the ever-diminishing square
that left, at the lawn's center, one
last uncut stand of grass, a wild fortress

I annihilated with a strange thrill,
then stood back to take a look—
to survey the field. To cast

a critical eye on my work.
Just as this kid is doing, standing
at the edge of the mowed clearance.

Taking his own measure. And liking it.

The clatter of rotating metal through sweet summer grass

“Feeling the smile and wondering why it was there, he awoke. He lay quietly listening, and the smile was explained.

“For he heard a sound which was far more important than birds or the rustle of new leaves. Once a year he woke this way and lay waiting for the sound which meant that summer had officially begun. And it began on a morning such as this when a boarder, a nephew, a cousin, a son or a grandson came out on the lawn below and moved in consecutively smaller quadrangles north and east and south and west with a clatter of rotating metal through the sweet summer grass. Clover blossoms, the few unharvested dandelion fires, ants, sticks, pebbles, remnants of last year’s July Fourth squibs and punks, but predominantly clear green, a fount leaped up from the chattering mower. A cool soft fount; Grandfather imagined it tickling his legs, spraying his warm face, filling his nostrils with the timeless scent of a new season begun, with the promise that, yes, we’ll all live another twelve months.”

-Ray Bradbury, in Dandelion Wine

My family’s push reel lawn mower didn’t make it into the 21^st century, but I’m pretty sure I was still pushing that thing in the ‘90s. (That would explain the embarrassing plenitude of ‘character’ I still hold in reserve, while all my friends have to show for their landscaping efforts are the sad, spent fumes of the very self-propelled, gas-powered engines that stripped them of their manhood.) 

Still, no matter how you do it, nothing says summer like the smell of freshly cut grass.

Summertime: no pants required