Observance
Michael R. Burch
Here the hills are old, and rolling
casually in their old age;
on the horizon youthful mountains
bathe themselves in windblown fountains . . .
By dying leaves and falling raindrops,
I have traced time’s starts and stops,
and I have known the years to pass
almost unnoticed, whispering through treetops . . .
For here the valleys fill with sunlight
to the brim, then empty again,
and it seems that only I notice
how the years flood out, and in . . .
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Mike’s notes: ​​“When I was 15, my father retired from the Air Force and we moved back to his hometown of Nashville. I didn’t know anyone and, being introverted, it took me time to make friends.
“Writing poetry helped me cope with my loneliness, boredom, and depression. I had feelings of deep alienation and inadequacy, but suddenly I had found something I could do better than anyone around me. (Perhaps because no one else was doing it at all?)
“However, I was a perfectionist and poetry can be very tough on perfectionists. I remember becoming incredibly frustrated and angry with myself. Why wasn’t I writing poetry like Shelley and Keats at age 15? I destroyed all my poems in a fit of pique. Fortunately, I was able to reproduce most of the better poems from memory, but two in particular were lost forever and still haunt me. I had learned a valuable lesson: Don’t destroy things in haste.
“In the tenth grade, at age 16, I had a major breakthrough. My English teacher gave us a poetry assignment. We were instructed to create a poetry booklet with five themes of our choosing. I still have my booklet, a treasured memento, banged out on a Corona typewriter with cursive script, which gave it a sort of elegance, a cachet. My chosen chapters were: Rock Songs, English Poems, Animal Poems, Biblical Poems, and ta-da, My Poems! Audaciously, alongside the poems of Shakespeare, Burns, and Tennyson, I would self-publish my fledgling work! (Well, after all, it had worked for Blake and Whitman, on a somewhat larger scale.)
“My teacher wrote ’This poem is beautiful’ beside one of my earliest compositions, ’Playmates.’ Her comment was like rocket fuel to my stellar aspirations. Surely I was the next Keats, the next Shelley! Surely success was now fait accompli, guaranteed!
“Of course I had no idea what I was getting into. How many teenage poets can compete with the immortal bards? I was in for some tough sledding because I had good taste in poetry and could tell the difference between merely adequate verse and the real thing. I continued to find poetry vexing. Why the hell wouldn’t it cooperate and anoint me its next Shakespeare, pronto?
“Then I had another breakthrough. I remember it vividly. I was working at a McDonald’s at age 17, salting away money for college because my parents had informed me they couldn’t afford my tuition. Fortunately, I was able to earn a full academic scholarship, but I still needed to make money for clothes, dating (ha!), etc. I was sitting in the McDonald’s break room when I wrote a poem, ’Reckoning’ (later re-titled ’Observance’), that made me catch my breath. Did I write that? For the first time, I felt like a ’real poet.’”
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Michael R. Burch is one of the world’s most-published poets, with over 11,500 publications, including poems that have gone viral. This does not include self-published writings; if self-published writings were included, Mike’s total publications would be well over 20,000. Mike has also had 74 poems set to music by composers, from swamp blues to classical. He is also a longtime editor, publisher, and translator of Jewish Holocaust poetry and poems about the Trail of Tears, Hiroshima, Ukraine, the Nakba, and school shootings. Mike’s full biography may be read here.
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