Many people gave their lives for what we have and for what we dream of having and should have.
They would hate what they see on Fox News, in our Congress, and in the rogue forum, we falsely label social media. It would break their hearts. It often breaks mine, especially what it sometimes does to me.
I will keep trying to the end.
Walt Whitman wrote “When Lilacs Bloom” to honor President Lincoln after he was murdered and his dead body was taken by train home to Springfield, Illinois.
Rural Americans all over the country planted lilac bushes as the train passed to salute Lincoln and remember him. “When Lilacs Bloom” is considered one of the greatest poems in American history.
It was an awful time when the poem was published, soon after the great bloodbath, the fight for slavery, the terrible divisions of the country. Whitman’s poem evoked hope for a better time and sorrow for the pain and suffering.
But humans don’t really learn from their mistakes, they mostly repeat them in worsening ways.
I think of lilacs often when I see the news or feel the hatred online. It’s hard to imagine a flower today being used in that way, yet it evokes so much.
Today the lilacs – many of them huge now – grace almost every farmhouse in the Northeast, including ours, a sign of the common decency and unity we seem to have lost for now.
So many of the farmers no longer remember what the lilacs were planted for.
The lilac blossoms make me sad in a way because we are again in a kind of ugly civil war, one that sometimes feels frightening and hopeless to me. Respect and dignity for others are hard to grow.
Whitman’s great poem was full of sadness but also of hope.
We always bring some lilacs into our house in the Spring. I love the smell of them in my study.
Whitman’s poem reminded me of the promise of Spring, the promise of hope.
Like him, I believe we will be united one day and learn how to treat one another with respect and dignity, the way God is said to have wanted. “Here!” he wrote, “coffin that slowly passes, I give you my spring of lilac.”
Bloodshed never fulfills that promise., neither do vicious speeches or arguments. In Whitman’s time, people had no choice but to speak directly to one another.
I pray for that time to return; I believe it will. I’m happy to smell the lilac in my study and dream and pray for that…
I was moved to write this poem verse myself, with a nod to Whitman:
When We Bring Back The Truth:
“When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
I mourned – a time when respect and compassion
blessed with ever-returning spring returns.
O ever-returning spring? peace and compassion
to us, you will bring.
Lilac blooming perennial, and rising star in the west,
I thought of those we love,
and the union he wanted so badly,
and the community we ache for.
O powerful, a western rising star!
O shades of night! O moody, fearful,
angry time!
Oh, the black murk that hides the star!
O helpless soul of mine,
Bring back the truth, and the honor,
and the kindness that will free our souls!”
— By Jon Katz, thanks to Walt Whitman
I wrote that stanza on impulse, and in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s America, of Walt Whitman’s heart, of the decency and empathy in all of us that I believe will come back to us when the Lilac blooms.
I think believing it could make it happen.
___
When Lilacs Bloom
“In the door-yard
fronting an old farmhouse,
near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac bush,
tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves
of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom, rising,
delicate, with the perfume strong I love
With every leaf a miracle…and from this bush in the door-yard,
With delicate colored blossoms,
and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A spring, with its flower, I break.”
–Walt Whitman
thank you. i love lilacs and after moving west from the midwest of my childhood they are not seen as much…too cool, or too dry…i think they love the seasonal changes. i never knew of this poem. a great message.
I do believe heaven smells like lilacs.
Flowers have a bit of magic to them. How often, when we look at them or tend to them, a person, living or deceased, is brought to mind. Or their individual fragrance takes us back to an exact moment. Now when I pass lilac bushes, I will think of Lincoln and how a certain freedom was born. We need to continue to plant lilacs.
I’ve been told that Lilacs were planted around outhouses to help cover the smell. Often the lilacs remained many years after the outhouses had disappeared. An old antique dealer, who used a metal detector to find things, told me he often had good luck finding things among lilacs that were not to distant from the old farmstead. He said things often got dropped in the outhouse and we’re not retrieved. Don’t know how reliable that information was, but it made sense.