Today I like to share two pieces of writing by Ross Gay, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The first piece is a poem titled, ‘Sorrow is Not My Name,’ and second is an excerpt from his collection of essays, The Book of Delights, which was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. Spring is mentioned in both pieces, but rather than merely a season, Gay uses spring as a metaphor for the heart’s opening in gratitude for “a million naturally occurring sweet things,” for the miracle of being alive to a world that, over and over, offers itself to our imagination and delight.
SORROW IS NOT MY NAME
No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of
feathers he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot, there are,
on this planet alone, something like
two million naturally occurring
sweet things, some with names
so generous as to kick the steel
from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought
for two bucks at the market.
Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man
behind me on the bus taking notes,
yeah, yeah. But look; my niece is running
through a field calling my name.
My neighbor sings like an angel and
at the end of my block is
a basketball court. I remember.
My color’s green. I’m spring.
THE PURPLE COMETS OF SPRING
From Ross Gay, The Book of Delights, 2019
“On the table before me, like a tarot reading, are four purple flowers, all of them collected on the five-minute walk from my home to my office. To the far left is a purple butterfly, a violet one. Next to that is some type of mint that comes up this time of year and makes a kind of pyramid of leaves – a steeple of leaves, with the purple parishioners peeking out. The parishioners being the flowers, and pouty ones. Next to that is an ivy whose purple petals yearn open, baring their tonsils. And to the far end of the quartet is a lilac flower, or flowers, as there are at least twenty-one open blossoms on this stem. These tiny flowers are cornets of fragrance. The cornets of spring. Among the purple things I didn’t gather today, and easily could have, are redbuds, the magnolia that smells of lemon, the insides striped like a tiger; two more ground-covary flowers I’ve seen crawling through gardens in the neighborhoods; and grape hyacinth, to which the other day my neighbors caught me kneeling and taking deep breaths in the grass easement between our houses.”