Hyacinths are strongly associated with rebirth and form a big part of the Persian new year tradition. They also get a mention in the spring section of The Wasteland;
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
"They called me the hyacinth girl."
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
As I wrote the poem I was musing on how strange a thing it was to be planting something whose promise of growth is so remote from the present moment, from the act of planting. I’m not sure that I know anything about the coming spring other than that those three hyacinth bulbs will shoot. That one of them will be purple, and the other two white.
As I did in the last post, I’ve included a recording of me reading the poem out loud, for those who prefer to listen to poems rather than read them.
You are an eye so resolutely closed even I could not pry your lids apart. A camera lens which opens once and only once to peer into the deepest dark. It is a darkness my own eyes could never stand. And neither of us can say what it is you see down there. Come spring, you will blink apart and I will bring you up into the house with us, up into the human world… the scent of your stems so decadent, beloved, it is almost decay. Is this your message to us then, tiny periscope, that in order to be sweet we must first be broken apart? That we too must be lost in the dynamite miracle of germination? You do not answer me… And so, I do what the packet instructions tell me is my duty to you: I bury you, plunge your fist into the almost- tender dark, the unknown loam, and I tell myself it’s because of you that I believe in spring.
Beautifully done, Jack. I'm not sure what's happened, but I couldn't locate the recording?